How well does he perform as a gym defender?
Two advantages that immediately come to mind: 1) two-bar charged move, in contrast with Ampharos' existing options; 2) wide neutral coverage. Otherwise, it's almost as slow and easy to dodge as ZC and FB.
Unless Niantic is planning a buff to DP, or there's some kind of mega-update looming, Ampharos w/ this move is weird. Having said that, I'm not going to pass up this opportunity to stock up on as much Mareep candy as possible.
Given that I'll gather hundreds of candy anyway during those 3 hours, I'll probably evolve a couple of high level ones to have some more ready-to-deploy "rare" defenders. I'm not too bothered if I don't find a high IV one to evolve, as (as it stands now) there won't be any offensive use for it anyway.
This argument sucks because dodging anything is easy if you're skilled at this. The average player does not dodge quick moves. And especially if the two first volt switches hit you they're going to hurt.
Stop acting like only Blissey and Chansey matter. Every move in this game is dodgeable. Every pokemon is easy to defeat with the proper counters. We all know this. Our task is to make that harder and Ampharos makes it harder than most Pokémon and surely is better than a Tyranitar, a Gyarados or an Aggron that populate gyms.
