Is Arcanine useless now?
In many regions, eevees are plentyful. So after a short time, many players will have a fire-spin / Overheat - Flareon.
Arcanine has a bit more defense, but its movesets are much worse. - the unique fire-fang is slightly worse then fire-spin, and fireblast is so much weaker than overheat - same energy, less damage, more time.
This is the only (1 in 6) STAB-Moveset, the others are lacking STAB and even worse.
I do not understand niantic, how can they make the best electric / fire / water pokemon so common, that more seldom pokemon of same type are pure trophys?
RIP Arcanine, i will miss you. After the first nerf, i still liked you, always prefering you instead of flareon in these rare opportunities that cried for fire, now i do not see a single matchup, where you could be usefull.
Answers
Is there a rational reason to use it over flareon, or do you simply like your arcanine?
I indeed see one rational reason, i have not mentioned before:
My legacy-Arcanine has FF / FT. This combination is still much weeker (10%) than best flareons, but with a faster quick attack and a 2-bar-charged attack, it is more flexible, when dodging - as somebody stated before: his flareon killed an exeggutor with fire spin allone, when overheat was ready to use, exegg was already almost dead, and overheat was kind of overkill. So, maybe a Flamethrower would have killed it faster.
No, i will not do so. All information is already given. All Pokemon Stats and all moves with their timings, dps, energy are public.
Gamepress rating was already quite arguable with arcanine before update. It used to be the best fire pokemon and was (and still is) rated lower than (despite prestiging) absolute useless blastoise p.ex.
Rating gives good inspiration sometimes. Inspiration for own thoughts, research and calculations.
