Pangoro enters Pokémon Go halfway through the Luminous Legends X event during the Season of Legends. For the first week of its release, you can only encounter its starting form, Pancham, in one-star raids, and after that, it’ll begin appearing in Strange Eggs, which you can acquire from the Team Rocket Leaders after defeating them. Pangoro is a technical Pokémon that favors being an offensive choice, so if you’re considering using this Pokémon, you need to optimize its attack stats and focus on building it with defensive teammates.
Pangoro is a Dark and Fighting-type Pokémon. It’s going to be weak against Fairy, Fighting, and Flying-type moves, but it’s resistant to Dark, Ghost, Psychic, and Rock-type attacks. For PvP, it has a maximum CP of 2,902, an attack of 190, a defense of 127, and a stamina of 182. Because of its stats, you want to stick to using it in the Ultra League, but it could also be useful in the Great League.
These are all of the moves Pangoro can learn.
Fast moves
- Bullet Punch (Steel-type) – 6 damage and 3.5 energy (3 damage per turn)
- Low Kick (Fighting-type) – 4 damage and 2.5 energy (2 damage per turn)
- Snarl (Dark-type) – 5 damage and 4.3 energy (1.6 damage per turn)
Charged moves
- Close Combat (Fighting-type) – 100 (120 STAB) damage and 45 energy (100% chance to lower user’s defenses by two ranks)
- Iron Head (Steel-type) – 70 damage and 50 energy
- Night Slash (Dark-type) – 50 (60 STAB) damage and 35 energy (12.5% chance to increase user’s attack by two ranks)
- Rock Slide (Rock-type) – 75 damage and 45 energy
Pangoro has several useful moves in each category. For the best fast move, you want to go with snarl. It takes three turns to fire, making it the slowest of the trio, but for a three move attack, it does a good amount of damage, and it has even better energy generation. Snarl enables it so Pangoro can use its charged moves far more often, potentially wasting an enemy’s shields.
For the charged moves, the best attack you want to make sure Pangoro always has in its kit is close combat. It’s a charged attack that only requires 45 energy, and it does 120 damage, 20 more damage because of Pangoro’s STAB. The next choice is night slash, a low energy charged move that requires even less energy. With these two choices, Pangoro can spam charged moves, forcing an opponent to waste a shield on any of them or regret not having any reserved shields to defend against them.
While Pangoro can spam its charged moves during a fight, the Pokémon won’t last long. With a low defense number, it’s not going to last forever. You want to use it as your final Pokémon or treat it as your first one during a PvP encounter.
The best moveset to teach Pangoro is the fast move snarl, followed by the charged moves close combat and night slash.
