What it does on the ladder
Heliolisk appears on 0.28% of Regulation M-B teams, which
is 127th of the 282 Pokémon with enough games to measure.
The move it almost always carries is Thunderbolt, on 57.5% of sets.
The item is usually Life Orb at 35.8%.
The ability is split: Dry Skin on 72.6%, Solar Power on 24.7% and Sand Veil on 2.7%.
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
Heliolisk is number 695 in the National Dex, a Kalos Pokémon, Electric and Normal
with a base stat total of 481 — 182nd of the 234 Pokémon
legal in this regulation. Its best stat is Sp. Atk at 109, 46th
in the format; its weakest is Defense at 52, 225th.
It can have Dry Skin, Sand Veil and Solar Power.
The Champions module tiers it UU.
It sits in a 2-stage line: Helioptile → Heliolisk.
Not all of that line is legal in this regulation — Helioptile is not.
What gets through
As Electric and Normal, 2 of the eighteen attacking types do extra damage to it. It
resists 3 and is immune to 1. 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 Heliolisk takes extra damage from.
- Garchomp — Earthquake (Ground, ×2), on 85.7% of its sets
- Sneasler — Close Combat (Fighting, ×2), on 99.7% of its sets
- Staraptor-Mega — Close Combat (Fighting, ×2), on 100% of its sets
- Blastoise-Mega — Aura Sphere (Fighting, ×2), on 34.2% of its sets
- Swampert-Mega — Earthquake (Ground, ×2), on 73.4% of its sets
- Venusaur — Earth Power (Ground, ×2), on 77% of its sets
Speed and weight
At level 50 with a boosting nature and full investment, Heliolisk reaches
177 Speed; left uninvested with a neutral nature it sits at
129. Invested, it outruns 15 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 21 kg, so Grass Knot and Low Kick hit it for 40 base
power. That is a real consideration in a format where both are common.
Its move pool
Heliolisk learns 83 moves in the Champions data.
50 of them do damage, across 12 of the eighteen
types, and 28 share a type with it and so get the same-type bonus.
Its hardest-hitting same-type move is Giga Impact at 150 base power.
It also has priority: Quick Attack at +1.
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.
