Gym attackers, gyarados

A good attacker that most likely requires you to live near water is gyarados.

It comes with good HP bulk for an attacker and one of the higher attacks stats in the game.


When Pokemon Go was just released you could get a version of gyarados with Dragon Breath as primary attack. It became a legacy move in August. Since then, until generation 2 was released, you could only get Bite as a primary attack.

Since the release of generation 2, and the latest patch made to attack moves, Bite and Dragon Pulse are identical apart from attack type.


Generation 2 also made Twister and Dragon Pulse into legacy charge attacks. The former is a dedicated defensive attack. Dragon Pulse is servicable as an offensive move.

However, the charge attack that really shines is Hydro Pump. It's a water type attack with STAB bonus for gyardos.


Now a gyarados can get Dragon Tail as a primary attack. It's slow but comes with a little higher DPS than Bite. It also powers up the charge attack as fast as Bite.

Since gyarados has a decent HP bulk dodging everything isn't as important, so Dragon Tail is basically a better attack than the old ones.


The new charge attacks are Crunch and Outrage. Crunch is a dedicated defensive attack, and Outrage is basically a slightly better version of Dragon Pulse.


A legacy gyarados should come with either Dragon Breath or Bite as primary attack and Hydro Pump as charge attack.

A new gyarados should have Dragon Tail as primary attack and Hydro Pump as charge attack.


Now, before we move on to preferred targets, and those better avoided, let's have a look at gyarados as a water type attacker. More specifically, let's make a comparison with vaporeon.

Water Gun comes out ahead of Bite and Dragon Breath in terms of DPS due to STAB, and it's faster at powering up the charge attacks. It still falls behind Dragon Tail despite the lack of STAB for Dragon Tail.

And this observation is done without taking gyardos base attack of 237 into account. Vaporeon comes with a baseattack of 205. That's a fifteen percent difference. While the extra damage output isn't 15 percent for primary attacks, there's still a small bonus to be had.

Hydro Pump, though, does almost all of that 15% as extra damage for gyarados.

Gyarados is basically a better vaporeon than vaporeon.


Depending on primary attacks gyarados works well against different types of targets.

• Dragon Breath and Dragon Tail against dragonite 
• Bite against exeggutor and espeon

It also is best to avoid some targets.

• Bite is awful against tyranitar and suboptimal if you run into a defending machamp.
• Dragon Breath and Dragon Tail are suboptimal against steelix and the occasional clefable

Hydro Pump works especially well against flareon, arcanine, rhydon, golem and tyranitar.

It's also a poor choise against vaporeon, gyarados, dragonite, exeggutor, slowbro, slowking, lapras

Last, let's look at a specific combination.

A gyarados with Dragon Tail and Outrage. Given that gyarados has an almost 44% higher base attack stat than lapras it suddenly becomes a perfectly valid lapras replacement for attacking into dragonite.

Lapras is still better for this job though.