Pokemon Go: Slaking weakness, counters

ByAdam B Hours
Slaking in the Pokemon Anime

Slaking is fairly similar to Snorlax in Pokemon Go, it’s often used as a giant health bar to defend Gyms, but what is the main weakness you can exploit to bring it down?

This article is designed to inform you enough about Slaking and its biggest weakness so that you know how to defeat this incredibly lazy yet durable discount king kong Pokemon.

What is the biggest weakness of Slaking in Pokemon Go?

As is typical in any Pokemon title, including Pokemon Go, precisely how strong a Pokemon is and what moves it uses may vary depending on the individual, but there are a few things that remain consistent across all versions of it.

The easiest thing to exploit with Slaking is its Type.

Slaking is, and assuming it doesn’t learn to mega evolve anytime soon, will always be a Normal-Type Pokemon. But Slaking is also a pure Normal-Type Pokemon. This means that it shares the weaknesses and strengths of all Normal-Types.

The Pokemon Slaking
The Pokemon Slaking, Credit: Bulbapedia

READ MORE: Pokemon Go: Snorlax Weakness, counters

The pure Normal-Type nature of Slaking puts it in a similar position to Snorlax. Or rather, the same position. It’s a big durable Gym defender for sure, and taking Ghost-Types against it is pointless as they’ll only deal 39% damage of their usual damage.

But if you point a Fighting-Type at it, Slaking will melt from the 160% damage taken modifier due to being weak versus that Type of move. In short, the main weakness of Slaking in Pokemon Go is Fighting-Type Pokemon.

What moves can Slaking use in battle?

Sometimes it can be worth considering what your opponent can hit you with, to try to pick a type that has an advantage against what damage they will do. With that in mind, Slaking does only have a few moves in total and no Fast attacks capable of dealing damage.

The full list is:

Fast Attacks
  • Yawn. (Normal) It does 0 damage. Seriously. It does no damage at all.
  • There are no other Fast Moves.
Vigiroth, the pre-evolution of Slaking, Pokemon.
Oh Vigoroth, where did all your energy go when you evolved… Credit: Bulbapedia
Charged Attacks
  • Earthquake (Ground)
  • Hyper Beam (Normal)
  • Play Rough (Fairy)
  • Body Slam (Normal)

This means if you can plan around possibly being hit by Fairy-Type or Ground-Type attacks, you can cover everything Slaking can hit you with due to the limitation of simply how few moves it has.

You might now want to dawdle though. If Slaking hits you with a Hyper Beam or two, you’ll know about it.

READ MORE: Pokemon Go: How to earn Stardust in 2021

Is there anything else?

This is a pretty similar case to Snorlax, where you’re mostly dealing with a large amount of durability and not a whole lot of firepower to back it up, so the key thing is persistence.

You can still shave off a significant portion of the time you’d spend wailing away on a Slaking by abusing that Weakness to Fighting-Type attacks though, and for your sake I’d recommend you do so in Pokemon Go, otherwise Gym battles might drag out a bit versus any Slaking you find.

If you’d be interested in reading more about Pokemon Go, you can find more Pokemon Go pieces on The Click right here, and more by me personally here.

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