
Show HN: What is the best Pokemon Type? - hackermanpr
https://medium.com/@bcollazo2010/what-is-the-best-pokemon-type-6b735f0afa7
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elechi
As someone who plays pokemon a lot, this reads false. While it's true Electric
is a good type because of the only one weakness (Ground attacks) and Ice is
cool because it has 4 super advantages (Fly, Dragon, Grass and Ground), it's a
terrible type because it also has 4 weaknesses (Fight, Rock, Steel, and Fire).

This analysis just _feels_ wrong. In pure type advantages, sure it's correct.
But Pokemon can learn other types of attack besides it's 2 typings!
(Infernape, for example, has the typing Fight/Fire. It's weak to Psychic,
Water, Flying and Ground. But it has access to moves to get around those
weaknesses, meaning that it's typing isn't as bad as this analysis would
suggest it is.)

I guess you can say, hmm, that's interesting, but in terms of game play,
strategy, and how good a pokemon can be, the typing is usually one of the
lesser concerns.

~~~
noobly
Also, no mention of potential types like Ghost/Normal that have no weakness,
or Ghost/Fighting that have complete coverage with their STAB moves. I haven't
played in ages, but surely there's more type combinations that are exceedingly
OP.

~~~
elechi
Ghost/Normal does have a weakness. Dark. There is no combination that doesn't
have a weakness, anymore. (It used to be Dark/Ghost, but then GameFreak came
out with Fairy type, which is super-effective against Dark.)

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mrob
This is comparing type advantage against _all_ other Pokemon, which isn't
representative of actual strength, because most other Pokemon are not viable
competitively. What actually matters is type advantage against only the
Pokemon with good stats and abilities.

Here's some recent usage stats of top ranking players using the strongest
available Pokemon (although lightly restricted by rules designed to prevent
excessively boring or luck-dependent matches):
[https://www.smogon.com/stats/2018-02/gen7ubers-1760.txt](https://www.smogon.com/stats/2018-02/gen7ubers-1760.txt)

Ice and electric are very poorly represented. It would be interesting to re-
run the algorithm on only the top n from this ranking.

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Isamu
Good to see this on HN. I'm waiting for an explanation that uses category
theory to arrive at a conclusion.

~~~
olodus
You see, Pokémon are like a burrito...

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Endy
You'd be right if you're only worrying about STAB attacks and pure defense,
sure. Admittedly, Bug has a lot of weaknesses and is a lower-tier element in
general, realistically what you want to do is have something resistant to
Water with a good selection of moves.

