Skarmory

Steel/Flying · Keen Eye · S tier · base 65/80/140/40/70/70 · the wall every aggressive team is built to break. It walls nearly all physical attackers, lays the tier’s only entry hazard, and Roars your setup out before you can sweep. If you cannot remove or neutralize Skarmory, your physical offense does not work.

Format role

Skarmory is not a threat you fear in the damage sense — its base 40 Special Attack means it never KOs anything. It is a threat to your game plan. Three jobs stack into the single most important defensive piece in ADV:

First, 140 Defense plus Steel/Flying makes it a near-perfect physical wall. Steel/Flying resists or is immune to a stunning slice of the physical metagame — it is immune to Tyranitar/Dugtrio Earthquake (Ground vs Flying = 0×), resists Metagross Meteor Mash (Steel vs Steel/Flying = 0.5×), resists Body Slam and Return (Normal = 0.5×), and takes Rock Slide and Focus Punch only neutrally. The standard physical sweeper simply cannot push it past 30–40% in one hit.

Second, it carries Spikes — the only entry hazard in Gen 3 (no Stealth Rock exists; see mechanics fundamentals). Skarmory is the best Spiker in the tier because it is so hard to KO that it gets multiple layers down over a game. Those layers are what turn a stall or balance team’s 2HKOs-against-you into OHKOs, and they are why every switch you make costs chip.

Third, the bulky Standard set carries Roar (Whirlwind is the rarely-seen alternative; sets run one phazing move, almost always Roar). Phazing undoes your Dragon Dance, Swords Dance, or Calm Mind boosts and racks up Spikes damage on whatever it drags in. A boosted sweeper that runs into a healthy Skarmory does not sweep — it gets blown out and chipped. (The faster Offensive Spikes lead drops phazing entirely for Taunt — see the set below.)

Put together: Skarmory is the keystone of the SkarmBliss/Tyranitar defensive backbone (see the common cores chapter) that aggressive offense exists to dismantle. For where it sits in the pecking order — co-S with Tyranitar — see the viability tiers.

The site embeds a TypeProfile widget above this section showing the full Steel/Flying resist/weakness spread.

The set you are breaking

Skarmory’s defensive chassis is the wall everyone knows — but the canonical set most relevant to an aggressive mirror is the Offensive Spikes lead, the fast, Taunt-carrying variant that races you. This is the set to build against:

Offensive Spikes — the lead that races you

Skarmory @ Leftovers
Ability: Keen Eye
Adamant Nature
EVs: 4 HP / 252 Atk / 252 Spe
- Spikes
- Drill Peck
- Hidden Power Ground
- Taunt

The aggressive Skarmory. Max Speed (252 Spe) with an Adamant nature lets it Taunt or Spike before slower setup sweepers and walls move; the 252 Atk investment is what makes its coverage actually bite. Spikes is still the reason it exists. Taunt is the offensive twist — it shuts off opposing Spikes, recovery, and status, denying the slow game the standard set wants and forcing a pure tempo race. Drill Peck is Flying STAB that 4× crushes the Heracross and Breloom that try to set up on it. Hidden Power Ground is specifically there to 4× nail an incoming Magneton before it can trap, and to dent the Steels (Metagross, Tyranitar, opposing Skarmory) that ignore Drill Peck. Leftovers is the only item that matters; Keen Eye is the default ability and does nothing here.

Note what this set does not have: no Roar and no Rest. The fast Adamant spread trades phazing and recovery for raw tempo — it lays Spikes and Taunts you down rather than walling and stalling. The slower Standard set (Careful, 252 HP / 252 SpD / 4 Spe, with Roar and Toxic) is the bulkier alternative you will also meet; it phazes your boosts and clocks your switch-ins instead of racing them. But it is the Offensive Spikes lead — see the DragMag sample team in sample teams — whose Taunt and HP Ground most directly attack an aggressive game plan, so it is the one drawn here.

How aggressive offense breaks it

Skarmory has exactly two real weaknesses — Fire (2×) and Electric (2×) — and a complete immunity to Ground that means your standard physical coverage move does nothing. Everything physical it doesn’t outright resist, it tanks behind 140 Defense and Leftovers recovery. So you do not “out-damage” Skarmory with a generic attacker. You remove it, or you exploit its two weaknesses, or you bypass it with Explosion. There are five proven aggressive lines:

1. Trap it with Magneton. This is the canonical answer and the entire reason Magneton is a top-tier piece. Magnet Pull traps Steel-types, and Skarmory is a Steel that cannot switch out. Magneton’s Thunderbolt is 2× (Electric vs Steel/Flying) and Hidden Power Fire is 2× (Fire vs Steel/Flying) — either one 2HKOs the standard set, and the Substitute variant can do it while blocking Roar with the Sub. This is the engine of the DragMag core (common cores): once Magneton deletes Skarmory, your Salamence / Gyarados DD set or Heracross SD set has no physical wall left and runs the table.

2. Blow it up with CB Metagross. Choice Band Metagross’s Explosion has a high chance to OHKO the standard Skarmory — and remember the Gen-3 mechanic: Explosion and Self-Destruct halve the target’s Defense during the damage calc (see mechanics & calc reference), so even Skarmory’s enormous 140 Defense is effectively cut in half for that one hit. Metagross can’t break Skarmory with Meteor Mash (Steel resisted, 0.5×) or Earthquake (Ground immune via Flying, 0×) — but it doesn’t need to. It trades its body for the wall, and on aggressive offense that trade opens the game.

3. Roast it with mixed Salamence or a Fire-move user. MixMence’s Fire Blast is 2× and roasts Skarmory on the switch — this is exactly why a single MixMence switch overloads the SkarmBliss core (Skarmory fears Fire Blast, Blissey fears the physical side). Charizard Fire Blast, Gengar Will-O-Wisp + Fire-coverage builds, and any Hidden Power Fire carrier (Magneton, Jolteon-style sets) all exploit the same 2× Fire weakness. HP Fire 2HKOs; STAB Fire Blast does far more.

4. Punch it with Medicham. Pure Power Focus Punch is only neutral on Skarmory (Fighting 2× on Steel × 0.5× on Flying = 1×) — but Medicham’s absurd boosted Attack means even a neutral Focus Punch tears a huge chunk off, and the threat of it forces the bird to play passively. It is not a clean OHKO, but it is real pressure that, combined with Spikes you’ve laid, grinds Skarmory down.

5. Out-Spike and out-Toxic it. If you can’t trap or nuke it, race it. Skarmory has no instant recovery in Gen 3 — it leans on Leftovers (and Protect on the bulky set) to claw back HP — so your own Spikes plus Toxic (from a teammate) ticks faster than Leftovers heals. Pile chip, deny it the Protect/passive-heal turns by phazing it yourself or keeping it pressured, and it eventually folds. This is the slow line, but it is why Spikes-stack offense (sample teams, Special Spikes Offense) works even without a trapper out.

The builder’s rule of thumb from building aggressive offense: every team needs a dedicated Skarmory answer — a trapper (Magneton), a Boom (CB Metagross), or a Fire move — and ideally redundant ones, because if your single answer dies, Skarmory walls your whole back half.

Load-bearing type matchups

These numbers decide whether your attack breaks Skarmory or bounces off it. The two right columns are the only two attack types that are super-effective; everything else is neutral-at-best.

Two facts to burn in, because they are the most common ways aggressive players misplay Skarmory. Earthquake does nothing — Flying makes Skarmory immune, so you can never rely on your sweeper’s Ground move to pressure it. And Steel resists both Dark and Ghost in Gen 3 (this changed only in Gen 6), so Tyranitar Crunch and Gengar Shadow Ball are resisted, not neutral — do not expect your Dark/Ghost coverage to chip it meaningfully.

What Skarmory threatens (and what it can’t)

Skarmory has no offense, so the question is what it shuts down, not what it KOs:

• Most physical sweepers. DD Tyranitar (Rock Slide neutral, EQ immune, Crunch resisted), CB/DD Metagross (Meteor Mash resisted, EQ immune), DD Salamence’s physical set (Rock Slide and EQ both blunted), DD Gyarados, and Snorlax Body Slam (resisted) all bounce off it. Skarmory phazes the boosted ones with Roar before they snowball.
• Setup, full stop. Roar/Whirlwind is the universal anti-setup button against anything Skarmory walls — it removes your boosts and feeds the dragged-in mon to your own Spikes only if you set them, otherwise to its Spikes.
• Slow, repeated chip. Behind Spikes plus Leftovers (and Protect on the bulky set), Skarmory grinds passive teams out of resources.

What it can not do is touch the things that exploit its weaknesses or trap it. It is helpless into a trapped matchup (Magneton, sometimes Dugtrio’s teammates), it folds to Fire and Electric, and it is purely passive into Taunt — a Taunt user (Aerodactyl, some Gengar, Tyranitar SubPunch leads’ pivot pressure) stops it from Spiking, Roaring, or Toxicing and lets your breaker set up in its face.

See also

• Magneton — the trapper that exists primarily to delete Skarmory. The #1 Skarmory answer on aggressive offense.
• Metagross — CB Explosion blows past the 140 Defense by halving it; the redundant Boom-removal of Skarmory.
• Salamence / Charizard — Fire Blast roasts the 2× Fire weakness.
• Tyranitar — the offensive S-rank counterpart; Skarmory walls its physical sets but folds to its Focus Punch chip + Magneton support.
• Blissey — the special half of the SkarmBliss wall you are trying to crack from both sides at once.
• Building aggressive offense · Common cores · Sample teams · Mechanics & calc reference