Pokémon of the Week #4: Gyarados

[Sirfetch’d]

Welcome to Pokemon of the Week! This is a new series that I will be doing each and every week during the Sun and Moon meta. I will be selecting one Pokemon and list a few things about it such as what tier(s) it is viable in, what are some of the best movesets, and then open a discussion on the Pokemon. You can chat about your experiences using or facing the featured Pokémon. And with that, let's continue this week with one of the classics, Gyarados!

#130 Gyarados

Since the introduction of Pokémon, Gyarados has always been a fan favorite and a standout Water type in competitive play. Gyarados has very high attack, pretty solid bulk, two really good abilities in Intimidate and Moxie, a strong boosting move in Dragon Dance, a pretty fantastic mega evolution, and good coverage moves in it's arsenal. Now thanks to Z moves, Gyarados can finally make good use of it's Flying STAB with a Z powered Bounce. Before the introduction of Z moves, Gyarados could not really even make use of it's secondary typing. Gyarados can opt to be your team's mega evolution as well considering that you gain an arguably better defensive typing becoming immune to Psychic and losing 4x weakness to Electric, but most people would agree that Z move Gyarados is a much better choice this generation. Should you use Gyarados on your team, here are a couple of sets you might want to try!

Gyarados @ Flyinium Z
Ability: Moxie
EVs: 252 Atk / 4 Def / 252 Spe
Jolly Nature
- Dragon Dance
- Bounce
- Waterfall
- Taunt

Gyarados @ Gyaradosite
Ability: Intimidate
EVs: 252 Atk / 4 Def / 252 Spe
Jolly Nature
- Dragon Dance
- Crunch
- Waterfall
- Substitute

Gyarados @ Leftovers
Ability: Intimidate
EVs: 88 HP / 164 Atk / 4 Def / 252 Spe
Jolly Nature
- Substitute
- Dragon Dance
- Waterfall
- Bounce

What are your thoughts on Gyarados? Do you feel that it's in a much better spot this generation? What is your favorite set to use?
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[punkysaur]

I simply love to use the flyinium z set. In taunt u have something to shut up stall and keep boosting. Tbh flyinium z boosted bounce is almost always a 1hko and thus u get the moxie boost too.
Once boosted to +2 its almost impossible to stop it.
The reason why i don't like mega-gyara is the abundance of fairy types. It simply doesn't have that much bigger impact on an opponent as the z move one.