Legacy Gyarados vs Palkia
How effective/useful is a Dragon Breath + Dragon Pulse Gyarados vs Palkia?
Answers
Not bad but not the best, it's going to do well as a counter.
Personally i'd use just for the heck of it, gyarados is a great pokemon, and while its not the best, it is FAR from the worst, it will do well, expecially if you're lacking in dragons.
Outrage is the better charge move, howver i dont recommend TM'ing away dragon pulse, if you can i's day buy a second move for it and give it outrage, could be good/fun for PvP after the raids are done with DB/PD/Crunch or hydropump
I see someone already answered this question, but I wanted to explain more about why. For these proofs, we'll assume that Palkia is not using Draco Meteor.
1. STAB
You may already know this, but STAB is an acronym: Same Type Attack Bonus. When a Pokemon uses a move with a typing that matches their own, the damage of that move is increased by 25%. So right out of the gate, Gyarados's DPS is outmatched by a significant margin.
2. Attack Values
Gyarados has a maximum attack value of 237. This is definitely not low, but it is less than Latios, Dragonite, Salamence, and Rayquaza.
3. Ability Parameters
Dragon Pulse has a DPS*DPE of 45. Draco Meteor and Outrage have a DPS*DPE of 62. That's over 33% stronger. If you have extra TMs or 10K Stardust, I recommend giving it to Gyarados so he can have Outrage.
Overall, Gyarados is a fantastic Pokemon, but he doesn't have the means to keep up with the elite.
If Palkia IS using Draco Meteor, then all the Dragons suddenly become worse that Gyarados, as they are all one-shot by the move.
If I recall I believe stab only factors for 20% now. This, coupled with the change of type effectiveness to 60% makes gyarados lag behind less, but still lagging.
Definitely interesting to see what Draco meteor is going to do to an unresisted gyarados though, I’d imagine it’s not going to stick around for too long, it’s like taking a solar beam from groudon which is a good 70% of health or more to gyarados.
"If I recall I believe stab only factors for 20% now."
This has been a subject of active debate. STAB was originally 25%, but when we had the first SE shift, it went down to 20%. I seem to recall it going back up to 25% around the second SE shift. But I can't verify this, and am having considerable difficulty getting solid data about what STAB is right now.
If anyone knows, and can verify their position, please post here.
>active debate
No it isn't this was answered when you asked this a few weeks ago.
https://github.com/pokemongo-dev-contrib/pokemongo-game-master/blob/master/README.md
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pokemongo-dev-contrib/pokemongo-game-master/master/versions/latest/GAME_MASTER.json
"sameTypeAttackBonusMultiplier": 1.2,
That's taken from the game master. The article here about PvP that lists a bunch of values taken from the game master listed STAB as 1.2x. If this did change then we would have seen breakpoints for a bunch of neutral STAB attacks change, but nobody reported it, which pretty much means it didn't considering any major change to the game master is discovered within minutes.
