RBY 2P-L Fire types

The fire types are all very similar, so I thought a thread comparing each of them might be helpful.

Name#####|HP |ATK|DEF|SPC|SPE|TYP1 TYP2
Arcanine | 90|110| 80| 80| 95|Fire
Charizard| 78| 84| 78| 85|100|Fire Flyi
Flareon || 65|130| 60|110| 65|Fire
Magmar ||| 65| 95| 57| 85| 93|Fire
Moltres || 90|100| 90|125| 90|Fire Flyi
Ninetales| 73| 76| 75|100|100|Fire
Rapidash | 65|100| 70| 80|105|Fire

Important Speed Benchmarks:
Dugtrio - 120
Rapidash - 105
Tentacruel - 100, Charizard/Ninetales - 100
Arcanine - 95
Magmar - 93
Moltres - 90
Articuno, Nidoking - 85
Gyarados - 81
Poliwrath, Dewgong - 70
Vaporeon - 65, Flareon - 65
Rhydon - 40

Looking at some important moves:
Fire Blast+Fire Spin - All
Agility - Arcanine, Moltres, Rapidash
Body Slam - All except Moltres
Confuse Ray - Magmar, Ninetales
Counter - Charizard, Magmar
Earthquake - Charizard
Psychic - Magmar
Seismic Toss - Charizard, Magmar
Submission - Charizard, Magmar
Swords Dance - Charizard

So.. which one would you choose?

Charizard is the only one with a workable SD set, but a lot of Pokemon are quite physically bulky and can hurt it back, it has quite a few weaknesses (ice rock electric water all suck) and it's kinda underpowered. Burning rock types with Fire Blast is clearly better to fish for than to do one-time damage with a boosted Earthquake which never does much more than about 60% to Rhydon.

Moltres is the best Special attacker, with its great Special. Agility/Fire Blast/Fire Spin/Hyper Beam is probably best pulled off by it. Tentacruel gives it more troubles than it does for Rapidash, but otherwise it does it better. Rapidash can spread paralysis a little with Body Slam though.

Magmar has the poorest stats arguably, but if you need your Fire type to hit say Nidoking or something really hard, then it does it best.

Neglecting speed, Flareon is the best Body Slammer. However not outspeeding Articuno, Gyarados, Vaporeon, Dewgong, Poliwrath, Nidoking (and probably others!) is frustrating. It has the second-best special too, so as a hit-and-runner, it's probably the best.

As a Body-slammer that cares more about speed, Arcanine, Rapidash, and Ninetales all offer slightly different things. Rapidash is the only one that outspeeds Tentacruel (although Ninetales ties) and it can agility (as can Arcanine) whilst its attack is better than that of Ninetales by 24 points, but worse than Arcanine's by 10. It has the same special as Arcanine (meaning it should only be chosen if you want to outspeed Tentacruel with it, otherwise Arcanine is better - Arcanine is a bit bulkier too), but Ninetales outshines both with 20 more Special.

 

Apart from sky attack, arcanine/rapidash can do the same, however have body slam too (and arcanine has higher attack). Rapidash's jump on base 100s and tieing 105s is neat (tentacruel, zard, ninetales, raichu, dodrio, probably others). Sky Attack is p much outclassed by hyper beam anyways (a charge turn before arguably sucks more than one after) apart from STAB.. but you're not hitting anything SE with it anyway that's not gonna be fire weak already (fighting types - still not relevant, + hate burns anyways). Its main draw over those is the extra special is really something, as strong as cuno but without a dewgong to wall it. Similar weaknesses though (4x rock and 2x electric, but a 2x ice weakness cuno doesn't have). Burns have little downside, moltres is fantastic in this tier, same as cuno is.

I think arcanine=rapidash < moltres just about.. well they're all similar but moltres has the most power. Flareon is harder to wall due to it having 110 special and 130 attack but everything being so fast means that it's not quite so worth it - it'll be a nightmare in the tier below though.

 

In my view you have to have a good reason to use anything that isn't Moltres, because it is just that powerful. FB is a nuke and burns + Fire spin is evil.

Zard is another fire type I could see myself using, as has been said it makes a nice anti-lead for Haunter + Grass types, but it's pretty crap outside that role as I see it.

Then there's Arcanine/Ninetales/Rapidash/Flareon. Magmar is shit. Using one of them over Moltres is really tough to justify imo, since they handle the same stuff but Moltres is so much more powerful. Firstly I'd caution against overrating the importance of physical attacking, since they don't get STAB their attacks are generally underwhelming regardless. The key to using these is that they lack Elec/Ice weaknesses, meaning you're mainly looking at using them against Cuno. Calc time!

Spoiler: toasted marshmallows are nice

Articuno Blizzard vs. Rapidash: 177-208 (53.1 - 62.4%) -- guaranteed 2HKO
Rapidash Fire Blast vs. Articuno: 194-228 (50.6 - 59.5%) -- guaranteed 2HKO

Articuno Blizzard vs. Arcanine: 177-208 (46.2 - 54.3%) -- 54.7% chance to 2HKO
Arcanine Fire Blast vs. Articuno: 194-228 (50.6 - 59.5%) -- guaranteed 2HKO

Articuno Blizzard vs. Ninetales: 153-180 (43.8 - 51.5%) -- 8.4% chance to 2HKO
Ninetales Fire Blast vs. Articuno: 221-260 (57.7 - 67.8%) -- guaranteed 2HKO

Articuno Blizzard vs. Flareon: 143-169 (42.9 - 50.7%) -- 2.2% chance to 2HKO
Flareon Fire Blast vs. Articuno: 236-278 (61.6 - 72.5%) -- guaranteed 2HKO

Based on those calcs I don't think Flareon is all that great, since Ninetales tanks Cuno almost as well as Flareon while outspeeding. Rapidash is probably the next best, since Arcanine's only significant advantage is its bulk, while Dash's speed is much more appealing imo.

Still, Moltres is the only fire type I've tried thus far so take what I say with a grain of salt

Lastly iirc Magmar doesn't even learn Fire Spin

 

Taking a look back at this, I'm wondering if Moltres is just OP.
I remember we didn't even use it that much when we played BL, but I don't remember why.

 

Yeah, basically I forgot about Vaporeon, as it is UU at the moment (and could be moved to BL)- that's the answer I was looking for. Grass types were not used at all when we played BL, nor waters like Gyarados/Tentacruel were. Dewgong was used at times, to stop Articuno.

About testing, I'm not playing a lot as I'm busy these days, but we need to know if Jolteon is legal.
Then we need to try different banlists... it takes a lot of time.

 

or we can try one banlist and see what happens. Idt anything will be broken. Not sure if anything will even be like tauros-level good.

Well okay a couple of things might be but idt they will be any worse. And if they are as bad as that no worries it's fine in OU. Not sure we will even need a banlist for UU.

 

Calculating the respective physical and Special Tankiness of each mon.

Name#####|PhyTnk|SpeTnk|
Arcanine | 98814| 98814|
Charizard| 91186| 96212|
Flareon || 72594|105894|
Magmar ||| 70596| 89244|
Moltres ||106474|133284|
Ninetales| 86552|104002|
Rapidash | 79254| 85914|

 

What method did you use is it simply hp*def?

 

y

Base Stat Ratings - Smogon University

something like that