Welcome to the start of the latest series from the Pokemon Go team at Gamepress: Hidden Potential! In this series, we're going to take a look at some potentially underrated Pokemon in Go and see if we can find their hidden potential and reasonably fix them using the tools at our disposal
To begin our series, we're going to take a look at what is currently the posterchild for Pokemon with potential; the pseudo legendary Pokemon of Generation 5/Unova: Hydreigon!
To start with, let's set some ground rules for how we're going to go about theorycrafting our target Pokemon:
- We cannot change a Pokemon's typing or stats
- We cannot imagine an entirely new feature to the game that would fix them. For example: no unofficial Mega Evolutions or regional variants, and no unreleased features like Dynamax or Z-Moves.
- We cannot add new moves to their existing moveset that they cannot learn in the main series or make moves that don't exist in the main series
- We can theorycraft new moves based on currently unused moves that are in their main series movesets
- We can add new effects that exist, such as theorycrafting them as Shadow Pokemon
- We can change the effects of existing moves, though we will also need to look at the meta implications of this change if we do so
- The cardinal rule: we can't do anything that Niantic can't do given current game precedent
With that out of the way, let's get to it!
PvP Performance
What’s Hydreigon?
Hydreigon’s current primary usage is in Master League/Premier Cup, running Dragon Breath + Dark Pulse, and then either Flash Cannon or Dragon Pulse as a secondary Charged Move. Typically, its other fast move, Bite, is skipped due to Dragon’s more relevant coverage and Dragon Breath’s raw power. Put simply, Hydreigon is a Master League Dragon Breath user.
This puts him in the same territory as Pokémon like Dialga, Palkia, Dragonite, Reshiram, and Zekrom. Its Dragon/Dark typing, specifically the Dark half, gives it a significant amount of extra play against Pokémon like Giratina-Origin and Mewtwo. However, despite its advantages, Hydreigon sees almost no play. Which raises the question: why?
What’s wrong?
In short, there’s nothing that makes Hydreigon stand out over other, better Dragon Breath users in the format. It just lacks meaningful Competitive Advantage. Getting more specific, there are three major things holding Hydreigon back. Let’s run through them one-by-one!
1) Being part Dark-type is more a disadvantage than an advantage
Dark-type is nice in a few cases. A double resistance to Psychic and a resistance to Ghost can be nice, but outside of the aforementioned Mewtwo and Gira-O, it’s not exactly relevant. In fact, it screws you over in a big way! While Fighting-types themselves (Machamp, Conkeldurr, and sometimes Lucario) aren’t that common, Fighting-damage shows up fairly often as secondary coverage. Mewtwo has Focus Blast, and Melmetal (and often Snorlax) runs Superpower. Psystrike/Focus Blast Mewtwo even beats Hydreigon in the 1shield with a bait! Almost more notably is Togekiss: Dragon/Dark is 4x weak to Fairy, and Hydreigon goes down in only 5 Charms! You may notice, by the way, that I specified Gira-O, not Gira-A. That’s because Hydreigon loses to Shadow Claw/Dragon Claw Giratina-Altered in the 1shield and 2shield, and gets pretty hurt on the way to winning the 0.
2) It’s slow
Dragon Breath’s 3 EPT isn’t exactly fast in any case. However, Hydreigon is yet further hamstrung by expensive charged moves. With Dark Pulse being 50 energy, and everything else it has being even more costly, Hydreigon really struggles to effectively land its charged moves. This comes in play in a big way in the Metagross matchup, where you get outpaced and lose everything except the 0shield.
“But Tyler,” you might say. “Dialga also is a Dragon Breath user whose cheapest move is 50 energy, and secondary moves that are even more expensive.” And that’s true. But Dialga is also significantly bulkier than Hydreigon, with absolutely fantastic defensive typing. There’s a reason why Dialga’s the best Pokémon in Master League.
3) Its secondary moves suck
Dragon Pulse (90 Power/60 Energy) and Flash Cannon (110 Power/70 Energy) are...not good. Flash Cannon could provide valuable anti-Fairy coverage, as it does in the main series, but it’s too expensive to ever realistically reach against Charmers without a major farmdown. This means, 90% of the time, all you’ve got is just Dragon Breath + Dark Pulse, and that’s kinda mediocre. Remember, to see real play, a mon needs to actually stand out among the other choices. And Hydreigon’s current toolkit just doesn’t let it do that.
How do we fix it?
We can’t change Hydreigon’s typing, or its stats. But what we can do is improve its movepool. As with the rest of the Pokémon GO, we can only use moves that Hydreigon learns in the main series, and in the absence of knowing how Niantic will handle this, we’ll only use moves it can learn in Sword and Shield, the latest generation of Pokémon. When building Hydreigon 2, our goal will be to emphasize its strengths, and try to fix some of its weaknesses. We don’t have to make Hydreigon the best mon in Master League or anything, just make it worth using!
| Move Type | Moves Available |
|---|---|
| Fast Moves | Snarl, Astonish, Fire Spin, Steel Wing, Thunder Fang, Ice Fang, Fire Fang, Iron Tail, Zen Headbutt |
| Charged Moves | Crunch, Body Slam, Outrage, Rock Slide, Flamethrower, Surf, Earthquake, Earth Power, Superpower, Stone Edge, Hyper Beam, Heat Wave, Fire Blast, Rock Tomb, Hydro Pump, Bulldoze, Focus Blast |
For Fast Moves, we can more or less disregard...well, most of these. Some of them are just bad (hi, Astonish), whereas others don’t really help play into what makes Hydreigon interesting. So if we’re gonna pick from any of these, it would just be Snarl. Snarl would turn Hydreigon into a weird pseudo-Darkrai mon, trading in Dragon Breath pressure for Charged Move spam. This Hydreigon would be incredibly different from our current one, and given Darkrai’s current….lack of success, this might not be the right path to go down.
Charged Moves get significantly more interesting. One notable move is Body Slam, which would allow Hydreigon to act as a Master League version of Great League’s Zweilous (Dragon Breath + Body Slam and Dark Pulse). Body Slam fixes many of Drei’s issues, giving it a cheap move to bait with, and allowing it to keep up Dragon Breath pressure. Notably, with one Dragon Breath of advantage (3 energy), Hydreigon can now beat Metagross in the 1shield (with bait).
Crunch (70 Power/45 Energy) could also be a valuable option, being 5 energy cheaper than Dark Pulse, giving Hydreigon a little bit more charged move pressure. Earth Power, while not enough to let it beat Dialga (Super Effective Dragon Breath hurts), certainly provides more shield pressure, and actually would let you win the 0shield with only 3 Dragon Breaths of energy advantage!
What’s the dream set, then? Odds are, Hydreigon’s best performance would be with a set like Dragon Breath + Crunch and Body Slam. The thing is, even with this, Hydreigon kinda underperforms. It simply gets outstatted by all of the other big Dragon-types, and it can’t help but get burned down by other Dragon Breath users. Palkia, for example, just gets to straight farm it down with 1 shield. Drei doesn’t even reach the requisite 70 energy for two Body Slams! Dark-type damage just isn’t quite valuable enough to make Hydreigon stand out.
So is Hydreigon just screwed in Master League? Kinda, yeah. It’s already incredibly difficult to be a Dragon-type in Master League given Dialga’s dominance, and Hydreigon just can’t cut it.
But all isn’t lost! There’s another non-CP capped format for Hydreigon to shine in: Premier Cup!
Getting this out of the way quick: You still lose to Togekiss, and you have a slight loss to Dragon Breath Gyarados in the 1shield, and you only have a slight win against Dragonite in the 2shield (you win with 2 health, you’re going to need a hundo!) But you’ve actually got some pretty notable wins! Hydreigon consistently beats Gengar (including the 0-2), Waterfall Gyarados (in all except the 0-1 and 0-2), Metagross (outside of the 0-0 and 0-2), Magnezone (in all except the 0-2), and Snorlax (normal and Shadow, even with Superpower, outside of the 0-1 and 0-2!).
While, yes, this would require a significant revamp of Hydreigon’s Charged Move pool, it’s possible, and Niantic’s done stuff like this before (Ludicolo, for example, has picked up two new charged moves since PvP’s inception). Just think: if Hydreigon gets Body Slam in a random update, and Crunch as a Community Day move, it’s already there! All is not lost for the three-headed dragon!
Hidden Potential Rating:
PvE Performance
What’s Hydreigon?
A miserable pile of secrets! As the Pseudo Legendary Pokemon of Generation 5/Unova, Hydreigon should naturally take up its place with the likes of Salamence and Metagross as one of the shining beacons of its generation. Instead, it’s more frequently compared to Tyranitar in terms of overall performance. And even that’s not a strong comparison, as Tyranitar has both a Shadow Forme and an upcoming Mega Evolution, both of which leave poor Hydreigon in the dust entirely. In practice, Hydreigon is best leveraged as a Dark Type attacker, where its Dragon sub-typing can occasionally come in and make it outstandingly bulky thanks to resistances. As a Dragon attacker, it’s generally facing Pokemon with far more attack and better movesets than itself, so it’s probably best to sit that meta out. It could be a good budget option, as it’s good as a Dark Type and passable as a Dragon Type, but its rarity makes it far less attractive for this prospect when compared to the Pokemon that more commonly fill this role, like Honchkrow and Weavile.
What’s wrong?
Hydreigon has more going against it than literally any other Pseudo Legendary that we’ve seen thus far. Its attack is relatively low, its moveset is lackluster, and it’s still incredibly rare, which just snowballs into a real mess for everyone’s favorite hydra.
1) Its attack is just too low to compete
Hydreigon has the lowest attack stat of any pseudo-Legendary Pokemon that we’ve seen thus far with the exception of Tyranitar. And not even that is a fair comparison, as Tyranitar has Shadow and Mega formes to fall back on, as we’ve already discussed. It can make a decent anchor when the stars align to match its typing on specific raids, but in most cases the attack deficit is just too great to make Hydreigon a valuable investment.
2) Its moveset leaves something to be desired
As a Dragon, Hydreigon is just plainly outclassed. It has the worst possible Dragon Type moveset outside of the absolutely pathetic Twister, and even if it was given the coveted Dragon Tail/Outrage moveset, it’s still just too weak to really compare. On the Dark Side its competition is generally a bit closer, and while its moveset isn’t bad, it’s best described as middle of the road. Could be worse, but could be better. This robs it of even more competitive advantage, and makes many other Dark attackers look far more attractive in general.
How do we fix it?
It has no Mega forme, and we can’t touch its base stats or typing. So our main option is a better moveset. We’re going to consider Hydreigon a lost cause on the Dragon side, as it would take huge changes to make it compete with Salamence and Dragonite, much less Mega Rayquaza. It still stands a chance as a Dark attacker though!
1) Fix its Moveset
To begin with, let’s do what literally everyone does when theorycrafting like this: give it a move that’s a literal clone of one of the most objectively powerful attacks in the game; Hydro Cannon! Why do this instead of just giving it better existing moves? Because even if we ignore what it can learn in the main series and give it a full set of existing Dark Type moves….
Image Source: Comprehensive DPS/TDO Spreadsheet
….it still doesn’t exactly make a gigantic difference. So back to the broken Hydro Cannon clone; we will name this move Brutal Swing, as that’s the name of a real Dark Type move in the main series that Hydreigon can learn, and Hydreigon’s species is called the Brutal Pokemon, so it fits!
Instantly, Hydreigon’s DPS and TDO rise by roughly 24%. That’s definitely substantial, but where does it drop Hydreigon when compared to other Dark Types?
It only makes it the best non-shadow/mega Dark Type attacker in the game, and we even have room to reduce the power of its charged move and still find outstanding results. In fact, let’s tone this move down a bit to see what a more realistic set would look like. For this experiment, we’re going to change the stats of Brutal Swing to match two other moves: Sky Attack and Psychic. These moves step back from the power of Hydro Cannon a bit, but may be a bit more realistic in reality.
While nowhere near as overpowering, these moves could still make Hydreigon perfectly viable, and gives us hope that Hydreigon definitely can be fixed with a realistic moveset update.
2) Shadow Hydreigon
Shadow Hydreigon makes far more sense than it may seem. First of all; we already have Dragonite, Tyranitar, Salamence, and Metagross as Shadows, so we have very strong precedent for shadow pseudo-legends. Second; in its debut series a Hydreigon was owned by Ghetsis, the big bad guy of the game. This particular Hydreigon infamously knew the move Frustration (which works differently in the main series, dealing more damage the more your Pokemon hates you), meaning Hydreigon could be right at home here.
While not as powerful as our outright broken Hydro Cannon/Brutal Swing variant, Shadow Hydreigon sees a very similar 20% damage boost as is customary with nearly the same TDO as its base forme. However, Shadow Hydreigon also brings a very nice feature to the table that many other shadows don’t: its Dragon sub-typing. As we’ve mentioned, Dragon’s long list of resistances tends to synergize well with a surprising number of targets that Hydreigon could be used for, making the defense drop a bit less damaging than it would be for many other shadow Pokemon.
Once again, this puts Hydreigon in a very strong place, and translates into a single resounding conclusion: it is definitely possible to fix Hydreigon by giving it a shadow forme!
...but just for the fun of it, let’s combine these two boosts!
With performance fairly comparable to Mega Gengar and second only to Shadow Mewtwo in terms of non-mega DPS, this variant of Hydreigon would be a must-have for any team, as it’s objectively broken to say the least.
Hidden Potential Rating:
Closing
Hydreigon really does feel like Metagross 2.0 at this point, though its realistic projections are a bit short of where the Iron Leg Pokemon ended up once Meteor Mash hit the scene. It has far more competition to deal with by comparison, and would need some fairly broken moves to shine as brightly as many of us want it to. However, it could still be an extremely reliable, and even situationally optimal choice for many scenarios given a few reasonable changes. Most of its Pseudo Legendary cousins have already seen buffs in the form of moveset upgrades, so it seems likely to happen at some point in the future. For now, it's probably best to hold onto any strong Deino that you may hatch or catch for the sake of a hopefully bright future for this dark hydra of a Pokemon.
