What it does on the ladder
Barbaracle appears on 0.01% of Regulation M-B teams, which
is 270th of the 277 Pokémon with enough games to measure.
The move it almost always carries is Protect, on 98% of sets.
The item is usually Focus Sash at 80.7%.
The ability is split: Tough Claws on 84.2%, Sniper on 15.7% and Pickpocket on 0.1%.
Those are Smogon's published usage figures, not anything measured here, and they describe what
the ladder plays rather than what is strongest. The full set is in the panel above.
The Pokémon itself
Barbaracle is number 689 in the National Dex, a Kalos Pokémon, Rock and Water
with a base stat total of 500 — 124th of the 234 Pokémon
legal in this regulation. Its best stat is Defense at 115, 31st
in the format; its weakest is Sp. Atk at 54, 201st.
It can have Tough Claws, Sniper and Pickpocket.
The Champions module tiers it UU.
It sits in a 2-stage line: Binacle → Barbaracle.
Not all of that line is legal in this regulation — Binacle is not.
What gets through
As Rock and Water, 4 of the eighteen attacking types do extra damage to it, and Grass lands for quadruple. It
resists 5. The board above
has all of it. No other legal Pokémon has this typing.
What threatens it
Smogon publishes no head-to-head checks-and-counters data for doubles formats, so this list is
computed, not measured: the most-played Regulation M-B Pokémon carrying a damaging
move of a type Barbaracle takes extra damage from.
- Garchomp — Earthquake (Ground, ×2), on 85.1% of its sets
- Sneasler — Close Combat (Fighting, ×2), on 99.9% of its sets
- Charizard-Mega-Y — Solar Beam (Grass, ×4), on 64.4% of its sets
- Sinistcha — Matcha Gotcha (Grass, ×4), on 97.8% of its sets
- Farigiraf — Thunderbolt (Electric, ×2), on 44.8% of its sets
- Staraptor-Mega — Close Combat (Fighting, ×2), on 100% of its sets
Speed and weight
At level 50 with a boosting nature and full investment, Barbaracle reaches
132 Speed; left uninvested with a neutral nature it sits at
88. Invested, it outruns 5 of the 20
most-used Pokémon in the regulation when they are invested too — which is the comparison that
decides who moves first.
It weighs 96 kg, so Grass Knot and Low Kick hit it for 80 base
power. That is a real consideration in a format where both are common.
Its move pool
Barbaracle learns 104 moves in the Champions data.
67 of them do damage, across 12 of the eighteen
types, and 20 share a type with it and so get the same-type bonus.
Its hardest-hitting same-type move is Meteor Beam at 120 base power, though the biggest number in the pool is Giga Impact at 150.
It has no priority move, so it moves in Speed order every turn.
That pool is what the team builder reads from when you seat it, and the
damage calculator will take it as the attacker with
the form already chosen.
