Analysis and ranking of the new Generation III Water and Ice Types

Earlier this week, Niantic has released a new wave of Generation III Pokemon, comprised of select Water and Ice types and featuring several interesting additions to the meta game.

In this analysis we’ll break down the performance and potential of the newly added Pokemon and help you understand which ones are worth your hard earned Stardust.

A too-long-didn’t-read version of this article is as follows:

• Once released, Kyogre will be the best Water type in Pokemon GO, outperforming any other Water type in Gen I – III and probably also in future Generations
• Milotic performs slightly worse than Gyarados, but outperforms Vaporeon
• Relicanth is a solid performer
• Walrein and Ludicolo are not as powerful as expected, but have viable matchups
• Wailord and Glalie are a complete disappointment.
• Sharpedo, Whiscash and Crawdaunt are also not good.

Damage output overview

For starters, let’s see how the newly added Pokemon stack up with the existing high tier entries. The following chart illustrates how well Kyogre, Milotic, Relicanth, Walrein and Ludicolo perform when compared to Gyarados, Vaporeon and Lapras. We discuss each Pokemon in details below the chart.

The chart above was made with the help of an infamous spreadsheet called “Choose Your Attackers v11.0”. Choose Your Attackers is a wonderful tool created by Albert Kleinstein and we highly recommend trying it out, especially if you’re an advanced player trying to min max your team.

Kyogre: the king will come

Unless Niantic heavily nerfs Kygore, it is expected that Kyogre will be a complete monster in terms of DPS and battle performance.

The currently highest DPS Water type is Waterfall / Hydro Pump Gyarados and Kyogre is expected to outperform it by roughly 12% increase in damage output over the same period of time. Kyogre also outperforms Articuno, making him also the best Ice type in game.

In addition, Kyogre has no double weaknesses and can counter a wide selection of Pokemon due to its varied move pool and superb stats. This also includes other Water, Grass and Dragon types.

Milotic and Relicanth are cool

Milotic, or better to say Middle-of-the-pack-ilotic, falls right into the “Vaporeon niche” with whom it shares a similar level of performance. We favor Milotic over Vaporeon as it has access to Blizzard, making it more versatile than Vape.

Relicanth is also a good performer, falling roughly in line with Omastar’s performance.

Walrein is worse than Lapras

We are very disappointed with Walrein’s performance, especially when you consider that Lapras was available since the launch of the game. Moveset by moveset, Walrein performs worse than a similarly equipped Lapras, losing around 7-10% of damage when you compare same movesets.

We still stand by our initial assessment that Walrein is a viable replacement for Lapras in some scenarios, but it’s clear that Lapras is still the king. Articuno still reigns supreme over both of them.

The disappointments

The rest of the bunch is pretty disappointing, with the exception of Ludicolo, that has some potential matchups, but its still lack luster. Our biggest disappointment is definitely Wailord as it doesn’t perform well in any role. That disappointment is closely followed by Glalie, which is pretty much useless at the moment.

This chart illustrates how the lower tier entries perform vs each other:

The final ranking

To conclude, this is how we see these new Pokemon ranking up to each other and to existing Pokemon.