Pokemon Go: How to defeat Palkia, weakness & counters

ByAdam B Hours
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Palkia in the Pokemon Anime

Last Updated on: 27th July 2021, 12:26 pm

Palkia has returned for Pokemon Go’s Ultra Unlock part 2 event, but what weakness exists to help bring down this mighty master of space?

This article is designed to inform you enough about Palkia and any possible weakness to target so that you know how to defeat the legendary Spatial Pokemon.

What is the weakness of Palkia in Pokemon Go?

As is typical in any Pokemon title, including 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 of any given species of Pokemon.

The easiest of these to exploit is often the Pokemon’s Type.

Palkia is a Water/Dragon Dual-Type Pokemon. While Dialga has kept their Steel/Dragon typing unique in Pokemon go thus far, Palkia actually shares this with Kingdra.

Fortunately, Palkia is unlike Dialga in another aspect – Palkia has far fewer resisted attack types due to this typing than Dialga does with theirs. As a matter of fact, Palkia has two possible weakness options to exploit and only three resisted Types.

Palkia defeated ( used in weakness in Pokemon Go article)
Palkia can be considered easier to handle than Dialga due to the difference in their Typings, but that doesn’t mean you should expect the fight itself to be easy. Make sure to exploit every weakness you can in Pokemon Go against Palkia for the best shot.
Credit: Bulbapedia

So, what are these weaknesses? Palkia is weak to both Dragon-Type and Fairy-Type moves. Meanwhile, they have basic resistance against Steel-Type moves, and doubled resistance against Water-Type and Fire-Type moves. To summarise this:

Palkia Resistances
  • Steel
  • Fire
  • Water

Steel-Type attacks will deal only 62.5% of their damage against Palkia, but they still fare better than Fire and Water-Types who deal only 39% of their natural damage.

Palkia Weaknesses
  • Dragon
  • Fairy

Both types do the basic Super-Effective damage rate of 160%. So given that we have a tie in damage rates, let’s see how Palkia’s move pool might influence these types and see which comes out better.

What moves does Palkia use in battle?

Fast Attacks
  • Dragon Breath (Dragon)
  • Dragon Tail (Dragon)
Charged Attacks
  • Aqua Tail (Water)
  • Draco Meteor (Dragon)
  • Fire Blast (Fire)
  • Hydro Pump (Water)
The Ultra Unlock part 2 banner for Pokemon Go
Like Dialga, Palkia is strong enough to be running the show for its own part of the Ultra Unlock event in Pokemon Go, but isn’t quite at enough strength to be using its own unique move, Spacial Rend
Credit: Leekduck

This one should be a pretty easy comparison for anyone who’s quite familiar with Typings in Pokemon Go. Palkia is weak to Dragon-Type attacks because it is a Dragon-Type.

However, that also works in reverse.

Both Palkias fast attacks and one of its charged attacks are Dragon-Type, meaning any Dragon-Type attacking Palkia is going to eat a hell of a lot of damage to exploit that Super-Effective weakness in Pokemon Go, and potentially lose the fight doing so.

Fairy-Types though? Those are the hardest counter available against Dragons. So if you’ve got a particularly strong Fairy-Type such as Gardevoir, Xerneas or Sylveon sitting around, they’d make for an excellent choice of counter to bring down Palkia.

Palkia counters – summary

To recap, Dragon-Types are a possible choice but are sub-optimal as Palkia will hit back as hard as they take, while Fairy-Types are the natural hard counter to Dragon-Types and should be employed as much as possible here – with preference to pure Fairy-Type Pokemon such as Sylveon or Xerneas.

With the weakness you’ll need to counter Palkia now revealed, at last, we’re about done on this topic.

If you’d like more stories, articles and guides for Pokemon Go, you can find them right here on The Click, and if you’d instead like to see more by me, a list of my articles is available here.