Victini: Predictions and Potential

Victini, the Victory Pokémon, was just revealed as a part of this year’s GoFest! So, the question is, is it good?

Short answer: no, but maybe.

Long answer:

Stats and Moves

At the time of writing, Victini’s moves are:

Fast: Quick Attack and Confusion

Charged: Psychic, Overheat, and Focus Blast

Victini has no Fire-type fast move. This means it’s likely to be immediately outclassed by….well, pretty much every other Fire attacker. When combined with its relatively low attack stat, Victini’s just not a great pick as a Fire raider.

As a Psychic-type attacker, it’s similarly underwhelming. While it does have the very solid Confusion+Psychic moveset (imagine saying that a year ago), its attack stat holds it back super hard. Purely in terms of DPS, it’s outpaced by Shadow Abra. If you wouldn’t use a Starmie as a Psychic attacker, you probably shouldn’t rush to max a Victini either.

If not PvE, how about PvP? Well, it actually has a bit more play here! Running Confusion + Psychic and Overheat gives Victini a slow but incredibly hard-hitting moveset. In Great League, it has a few notable wins. Consistently taking down Toxicroak, Venusaur, and Haunter is nice (thanks, Confusion). It’s also able to beat any Hypno that isn’t running Shadow Ball, and only needs a little bit of chip damage to oneshot Registeel with Overheat. Additionally, it has wins against Dewgong, Tropius, Charmers, and sometimes even Lapras! Thanks to its solid neutral coverage, it can honestly put up a fight against pretty much anything that isn’t Water.

In Ultra, it’s potentially even better! Holding its strong wins against Registeel and Charmers, it actually picks up Cresselia if you manage your energy properly! It does, unsurprisingly, have some really hard losses against common Pokémon like Giratina (both of them), Swampert, Alolan Muk, and Obstagoon.

Master League is probably its worst format. Only maxing out at 3265 isn’t necessarily a death sentence, but the sheer number of Dragon-types in the format prevents it from fully leveraging the power of Overheat. It beats some Fighting-types, it beats Togekiss….but that’s basically it. There’s no real reason to pick it over something like Mewtwo.

All things considered? It’s just not that impressive. Victini is a perfectly fine Pokémon in Great and Ultra, but it’s not really one you should be rushing to bring out. UNLESS

Victini is a Pokémon that is, in the main series, heavily defined by its two Signature Moves: Searing Shot and V-Create. Both are high-damage Fire-type attacks, and if Niantic decided to bless Victini with one or both of them, it could absolutely give the mon some power! This isn’t unprecedented by any means, either! Deoxys got Psycho Boost and Jirachi got Doom Desire, so what’s to stop Niantic from giving Victini some new toys? Let’s theorycraft!

So, let’s say Searing Shot becomes a Fast Move, and V-Create becomes a Charged Move. If we set Searing Shot to share stats with Fire Fang (the current best Fire-type fast move), Victini becomes much more usable as a Fire attacker, but it’s still...worse than Houndoom and Arcanine. How good would V-Create have to be to make Victini relevant?

In this case, we’ll set Overheat as the base, and only tweak the Power. Overheat is a 160 base power move.

To be the top non-Shadow Fire-type attacker (so, at the moment, better than Reshiram), V-Overheat would have to be a 250 Power move. That’s probably a little bit unrealistic. Let’s just make it comparable to other top Fires instead. At 200 Power, Victini would end up with 16.007 DPS, putting it above Infernape and Charizard, but just below Moltres, which would be entirely reasonable and worth using.

For PvP, there are so many variables to mess with, and so many ways for Victini to become more interesting. For the sake of simplicity, though, let’s talk V-Create.

In the main series, V-Create reduces your Defense, Special Defense, and Speed by 1 stage each. In GO, Speed changes have been analogous to Attack changes (Icy Wind and Bubblebeam lower Speed in main series and Attack in GO, for example). Similarly, moves that would change both the Physical and Special version of a stat translate to 2-stage changes in GO (Ominous Wind/Silver Wind/Ancient Power). This means that V-Create would likely reduce Attack by 1 Stage, and Defense by 2 stages, making it a weird combination of Superpower and Close Combat.

If you look at moves like Close Combat and Wild Charge (which reduce your defense by 2 stages), these lead to a playstyle of building up enough energy to fire off two back-to-back and then switching out to reset your debuffs. As such, V-Create should cost at most 50 energy, but preferably closer to 40 or 45, to be comparable to Superpower and Wild Charge. As for Power, 100 sounds like a fair minimum, since the attack debuff would make it less effective on the second hit.

Searing Shot could be anything, frankly. Given that there’s much less of an analogue between main series moves and their fast move counterparts, it’s hard to draw any real conclusions. That said, energy generation would be nice to more effectively leverage back-to-back V-Creates.

At the moment, Victini’s honestly pretty underwhelming. It’s not the most unique thing in PvP, it doesn’t have the numbers for PvE. But what it does have is potential, and Niantic’s handling of its signature moves is what will define its utility at the end of the day.

C’mon, Niantic. Make it good.

Do it for me.

(Keep in mind that everything included here references pre-release datamined movesets, and as such anything could potentially be changed by the time Victini actually gets released!)