Rock-Type weakness & Strength Explained: A Guide to Rock-Types

By Devin KellyApr 20, 2022Updated:Feb 6, 2023

If ya smell what the Rock (Pokemon) are cooking, then you’re gonna need to know how to beat them.

In this guide, I’ll talk about every Rock-type weakness and strength (and trust me, there are a lot) on both offense and defense.

The Rock Chart

If you’re familiar with Pokemon-type charts, then scroll to the bottom and I’ve included one that only deals with Rock-type Pokemon so that it is easy to read.

Rock Type Pokemon Weakness (Defense)

Let’s start off with defense. If you’re facing a Rock-type Pokemon, you’re going to want to use a move of one of the following types:

Water
Grass
Fighting
Ground
Steel

Most of these are pretty intuitive so they are easy to remember. Moves of these types will deal double damage to a Rock Pokemon (unless it has a secondary type that balances the damage out).

Rock Type Pokemon Weakness (Offense)

By offensive weakness, I mean that you do not want to use a Rock-type move against the following types of Pokemon:

Fighting
Ground
Steel

These types of Pokemon will take half damage from Rock-type moves, so make sure your Onix has a diverse move set.

Rock Type Pokemon Strengths (Defense)

Now let’s look at what is weak to Rock-type Pokemon. Rock-type Pokemon will take half damage from moves belonging to the following types:

Normal
Fire
Poison
Flying

Again, there’s nothing too surprising here. You can’t catch a rock on fire, and you definitely can’t poison one, so it’s no surprise these moves are weak to Rock-type Pokemon.

Rock Type Pokemon Strengths (Offense)

Rock Pokemon also have quite a few strengths on the offensive side. Rock-type moves are going to deal 2x damage to Pokemon with these typings:

Fire
Ice
Flying
Bug

Nothing groundbreaking here, Rocks will shatter ice, put out fires, and squish bugs.

Beyond Typings (Defense VS Special Defense)

When playing Pokemon, you need to understand that it isn’t all about Pokemon types. Rock Pokemon typically have a high defense stat.

This means they take less damage from physical moves, like Aqua Jet for example. So even though Rock types are weak to Water, a physical Water-type move is not guaranteed to KO.