I think that out of all of them Earthquake is the worst. It is stuck on so many pokemon as coverage, and is literally close to Shadow Sneak or Twister in terms of performance. I had been used that move numerous times and it is seriously not fun or nt practical to use because it charges slowly, hits with the strength of a stuffed pillow and is as slow as Solar Beam.
At least Flash Cannon, Close Combat, Stone Edge and Psychic were fast acting and Overheat, Draco Meteor and Solar Beam were powerful. And those moves were all kind of horrid.
I would say that Psycho Boost and Brave Bird are horrid too, but i seldomly use them and I in fact gave my Deoxys Thunderbolt after seeing Psycho Boost once.
As far as common moves go Earthquake and Psychic are both pretty awful. Earthquake is anywhere between 20-30 base points behind where it should be. Psychic has lower base power and a longer cool-down than Future Sight which makes it lacking as a full-bar attack.
A full bar move like Brave Bird having less than 100 base power simply shouldn't exist and Psycho Boost being exclusive to something with paper thin bulk should have its cooldown cut in half.
If Earthquake had 30 more hitpoints Groudon would be the best Pokemon in the game, hands down. A Pokemon with great DPS that's also super effective against many targets. The pokemon with the highest DPS are not meant to be super effective against many targets. This is a balance issue.
So at this point, buffing earthquake would be a bad idea. A better idea would be to bring in a superior ground move that some ground Pokemon can learn, but not Groudon.
Groudon with MS/EQ currently deals 13.867 neutral DPS, which is far behind Dragonite (17.148 with DT/OR), Machamp (16.115 with Ct/DP), Charizard (15.741 with FS/BB), Gardevoir (14.888 with Cn/DG), Tyranitar (14.321 with SD/SE) and even Gyarados (14.105 with WF/HP). That is just how bad EQ is; a 20% buff would be reasonable.
Ground isn't that relevant of an attacking type in POGO actually. Just looking at its effectiveness, it has very wide coverage, but POGO puts heavy priority on legendaries. And there aren't that many that are weak to ground. Looking at gens 1-4, Groudon is already the best against Raikou and Heatran, and loses to non-legendaries against Entei and Dialga. Which makes zero sense. Buffing Groudon to where it would be the best counter to those two as well would be better game design, since legendaries are harder to power up than non-legendaries. And in gen 5, Rayquaza would out-DPS a buffed Groudon against Zekrom and Reshiram anyway.
As for gyms, EQ is slow and single bar, which means Groudon as a gym attacker wouldn't be OP even if you buffed EQ. Single bar moves frequently lead to energy waste, which leads to slower clear times than you'd expect based on the cycle DPS.
I think Zap Cannon is more decent than outright bad. Its main issue is that it has a 3 second damage window, meaning it takes a full 3 seconds before even making contact. This makes it easy to get knocked out after tapping the charge move button but before actually making contact, wasting a full bar. For comparison, Hydro Pump has similar base power and cooldown but is still regarded as pretty good since it has a very early damage window of less than a second.
Earthquake is slightly faster than Zap Cannon, both in terms of damage window and cooldown. The full 30 points would be ideal but an additional 20 wouldn't be as bad as you're making it out to be. It would be leagues better than it is now at least.
EQ is still very slow, but you are right. It's just easy to hate on ZC because it's usually paired with TB in movepools that's just outright better in so many ways. I just want EQ to be good, because from what I've seen of the main series, it seems to have stayed a relevant and powerful coverage move for generations.
For good reason. Base 100 power, 100% accuracy with 10PP that hits a wide array of targets and can be learned by several Pokemon for STAB or as a filler? Yes please.
That's the other issue Zap Cannon has that Earthquake wouldn't, part of the ZC hate comes from comparison of other moves. Why use it when TB or WC can also be learned and are infinitely superior? Since ground as a whole is lacking Earthquake becoming head and shoulders better than the rest will probably deter some of the harsher criticisms.
I generally use DPS*DPE to rank how good a move is, whilst giving brownie points to moves that aren't one-charge bar moves. Some of the moves you described as horrid aren't actually bad. Overheat and Solar Beam are actually good moves due to their high base power (Overheat has a DPS*DPE is 64, which is better than Future Sight at 53.33; Solar Beam is 66.11).
Using DPS*DPE, you have some of the 3-charge bar moves as the worse moves in the game due to their pitiful power. Struggle is the lowest of those currently available at 16.87, lower than even Psychic (35.71), the next worse being Vice Grip. Psycho Boost is the worse 2-charge bar move at 24.50. Heat Wave is the worst 1-bar charge move (30.09) - thank a low 95 power and a slow 3 second move for that.
So IMO worse moves are Struggle, Psycho Boost, and Heat Wave.
Overheat is the second best fire charge move, behind only Blast Burn. It's a very good move that let Flareon be top5 neutral DPS back in early gen 2 times. Still the best fire charge move for Moltres, the top fire DPS.
Draco Meteor is also a very good charge move. Again, second best of its type. DT/DM Dragonite is only 2% behind DT/OR Dragonite in TTW against Giratina. That's a very small difference.
Solar Beam has more competition but it's also a strong move. Behind FP, GK/PW and LB, it still puts out good DPS. SoB Exeggutor was the top grass in the game for almost two years.
FC, CC, SE and Psychic are all bad, there you are correct. I find ordering the charge move list by DPS*DPE is a pretty ok ranking. It's not entirely correct, but at least gives you the correct ballpark.
Here's a good rule of thumb for rating charged moves. Take the total power plus 110 and divide it by the total cooldown time plus 10.5. This is because the average fast move takes around 10.5 seconds to fully charge the bar and deals about 110 damage in that time. So if you were to calculate the total dps of a moveset consisting of the hypothetical average fast move, plus any charge move, the dps over one cycle would be roughly what I said above.
For instance, the dps from earthquake would be ((120 + 110) / (3.6 + 10.5)) = 16.31.
For psycho Boost, it is (((70 * 2) + 110) / ((4 * 2) + 10.5)) = 13.51.
For reference, meteor Mash (a truly great move) has a rating of 19.87.
I haven't updated my calculations in awhile, but from the last time I checked, the worst common charged move based on this metric is Twister with 12.96 and the best is frenzy Plant (and therefore also meteor Mash) with 19.87.
To be clear, this is not always 100% valid in the real world. Obviously real fast moves don't exactly match the parameters of the hypothetical average fast move, so the balance of dps and eps of a given fast move can make certain charged moves more or less effective. However, this scale has proved to be a very good indicator of what moves are good in general, especially if those moves are available on a wide variety of Pokemon with a wide variety of fast moves.
