What it does on the ladder
Torkoal appears on 6.1% of Regulation M-B teams, which
is 27th of the 282 Pokémon with enough games to measure.
The move it almost always carries is Protect, on 90.1% of sets.
The item is usually Charcoal at 83.9%.
The ability is split: Drought on 99.6%, White Smoke on 0.3% and Shell Armor on 0%.
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
Torkoal is number 324 in the National Dex, a Hoenn Pokémon, Fire
with a base stat total of 470 — 200th of the 234 Pokémon
legal in this regulation. Its best stat is Defense at 140, 10th
in the format; its weakest is Speed at 20, 234th.
It can have White Smoke, Drought and Shell Armor.
The Champions module tiers it UU.
It has no evolutions on either side; what you see is the whole line.
What gets through
As Fire, 3 of the eighteen attacking types do extra damage to it. It
resists 6. The board above
has all of it. 5 other legal Pokémon share the same typing and the same board: Ninetales, Arcanine, Typhlosion, Flareon, Simisear.
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 Torkoal takes extra damage from.
- Garchomp — Earthquake (Ground, ×2), on 85.7% of its sets
- Basculegion — Aqua Jet (Water, ×2), on 96.6% of its sets
- Aerodactyl-Mega — Rock Slide (Rock, ×2), on 99.8% of its sets
- Blastoise-Mega — Water Spout (Water, ×2), on 96.4% of its sets
- Swampert-Mega — Wave Crash (Water, ×2), on 97.6% 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, Torkoal reaches
79 Speed; left uninvested with a neutral nature it sits at
40. Invested, it outruns 0 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 80.4 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
Torkoal learns 88 moves in the Champions data.
54 of them do damage, across 9 of the eighteen
types, and 16 share a type with it and so get the same-type bonus.
Its hardest-hitting same-type move is Eruption at 150 base power, though the biggest number in the pool is Explosion at 250.
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.
