Ice Type Weakness: 4 Attackers Exploit It, Only Ice Resists Itself

Pull up Ice’s raw stats and it looks fine. Pokémon Database ranks the average Ice-type Pokémon #2 in HP and a respectable #6 in both Defense and Special Defense across all 18 types [1]. On paper, Ice should be a tanky, durable typing. In practice, ask any competitive player which type they’d least want to build a defensive core around, and Ice comes up almost every time.

The gap between those two facts is the whole story. Ice isn’t bad because its Pokémon are frail — it’s bad because the type itself has the worst weakness-to-resistance ratio in the game, and no amount of raw bulk fixes a typing problem. Here’s the exact math behind that claim, what it means for team building, and how it plays out differently in the main series versus Pokémon GO.

Ice’s Defensive Profile, By the Numbers

Every Pokémon type interaction boils down to a fixed chart that hasn’t changed since Generation VI introduced the Fairy type in 2013 [1]. For pure Ice-type Pokémon (Regice, Glaceon, Vanilluxe), that chart is unusually lopsided:

Four of the eighteen types hit Ice for double damage. Exactly one type — Ice itself — does reduced damage back. There’s no immunity to fall back on the way Ground gets against Electric or Ghost gets against Normal. That’s a 4-to-1 weakness-to-resistance ratio, and as the next section shows, nothing else in the game comes close to being that unbalanced.

Why Ice Is Officially the Worst Defensive Type in the Game

“Worst defensive type” gets thrown around loosely, so it’s worth actually running the numbers instead of taking the claim on faith. Multiplying out the confirmed weakness and resistance counts for all 18 types [1][2][3][4][5] and scoring each one as (resistances + immunities) minus weaknesses gives a clean, comparable defensive score:

Grass, Rock, and Psychic tie for second-worst at -1. Ice sits alone at -3 — a full two points worse than its nearest competitor. Put another way: Grass and Rock both carry five weaknesses, but they at least resist four types each, so a Grass or Rock Pokémon has a real chance of walling something. Ice has one job it can do defensively (block other Ice moves) and four ways to get blown up doing it. That gap, not the raw weakness count, is what actually makes Ice the worst defensive typing rather than merely a bad one.

The Stat Trap: Good Bulk, Bad Typing

This is why the “Ice types are just fragile” explanation doesn’t hold up. Pokémon Database’s average-stat rankings put Ice at #2 for HP and #6 for both defensive stats [1] — solidly above the midpoint of all 18 types. Weavile, Mamoswine, and Kyurem aren’t glass cannons on paper. They get punished anyway, because a Fire, Fighting, Rock, or Steel move ignores how much HP or Defense sits behind it; the 2x multiplier applies before any of that bulk gets a chance to matter. A 100-Defense Ice-type takes the same doubled hit as a 60-Defense one. Typing sets the ceiling on how much stats can help, and Ice’s ceiling is low no matter what’s underneath it.

How Dual-Typing Makes Ice’s Weakness Better — or Catastrophically Worse

Almost no competitively relevant Ice-type is pure Ice. Pairing it with a second type multiplies the two type charts together, and depending on the partner, that can fix the problem or make it dramatically worse.

Alolan Sandslash (Ice/Steel) is the clearest example of both outcomes happening at once. Steel’s ten resistances cancel out Ice’s weakness to Rock entirely (Ice’s 2x times Steel’s 0.5x resistance = neutral) and add a quad-resistance to Ice-type attacks on top of an immunity to Poison. But Steel is also weak to Fire and Fighting [2] — the same two types Ice is already weak to — so those multipliers stack instead of canceling. The result is a Pokémon that resists seven types and is immune to one, but takes 4x damage from both Fire and Fighting moves at once. Sandslash trades four manageable weaknesses for two that can one-shot it.

Weavile (Dark/Ice) follows the same pattern from a different angle. Dark is weak to Fighting; Ice is also weak to Fighting; multiplied together, Weavile takes 4x from Fighting-type moves — a well-documented reason priority Fighting moves check it so hard in competitive play. It does pick up three resistances (Ghost, Dark, Ice) and a Psychic immunity from the Dark half, a real improvement over pure Ice.

Mamoswine (Ice/Ground) shows the opposite trade-off: no 4x weaknesses, but a wider spread of 2x ones. Ground’s own weaknesses to Water and Grass stack onto Ice’s Fire and Fighting weaknesses, leaving Mamoswine 2x weak to five separate types (Fire, Fighting, Steel, Water, Grass) instead of Ice’s baseline four — though it does gain an Electric immunity and a Poison resistance, and Ground’s Rock resistance cancels Ice’s Rock weakness entirely.

The pattern holds generally: pairing Ice with a type that shares its weaknesses (Steel and Fire; Dark and Fighting) concentrates risk into fewer, deadlier 4x weak spots. Pairing it with a type that doesn’t overlap (Ground, Water, Flying) spreads the risk into more numerous but individually survivable 2x weaknesses.

How to Play Around Ice’s Weakness

The right approach depends entirely on what you’re actually doing with an Ice-type Pokémon:

The one-sentence decision rule that covers most of this: before you commit an Ice-type to a matchup, ask whether the opponent has a Fire, Fighting, Rock, or Steel move — if you don’t know, assume they might and keep a switch-in ready.

Beating Ice-Type Raid Bosses in Pokémon GO

The defensive math above applies just as directly to Pokémon GO raids, where Ice-type bosses (Kyurem, Regice, Beartic, Cloyster) share the same four exploitable weaknesses. For a full breakdown of how GO’s damage multipliers work, see our Pokémon GO type chart guide. Here’s what to actually bring:

Fighting and Rock attackers are usually the safer picks against Ice raid bosses specifically, since most Ice-types (being Water- or Flying-adjacent) don’t hit back with a move that’s super effective against Fighting or Rock in return. Steel and Fire attackers work too, but double-check the boss’s secondary typing first — an Ice/Water boss like Cloyster resists Fire outright, which can quietly tank your team’s DPS if you didn’t check the full raid boss counter list beforehand.

FAQ

Is Ice really the single worst defensive type, or just one of the worst?
By the numbers, it’s alone at the bottom. Grass, Rock, and Psychic all score -1 on the weakness-minus-resistance scale above; Ice scores -3, a clear two-point gap. The reason it’s not just “tied for worst” is that Grass and Rock still carry four resistances each to offset their five weaknesses — Ice has exactly one.

Why does Ice resist only itself and nothing else?
This goes back to Ice’s design role: it’s meant to be a strong offensive type (super effective against Dragon, Flying, Ground, and Grass) at the cost of defensive reliability. Game Freak has never added a second Ice resistance in any generation, including when Fairy was introduced in Gen VI specifically to rebalance other overpowered defensive types.

Does adding a second type ever fully fix Ice’s weakness problem?
No pairing eliminates it, but some come close. Water/Ice (Cloyster, Lapras) neutralizes the Fire weakness (Water resists Fire) while only adding a shared Rock 2x weakness on Cloyster’s side — not a fix, but a real improvement over stacking two overlapping weak types like Steel or Dark.

Should I avoid Ice-types entirely on a defensive team?
Not entirely — avoid using one as your only defensive answer to a matchup. Ice-types earn their slot through offensive coverage (that Dragon/Flying/Ground/Grass sweep is real), not defensive walling. Build around what they hit, not what they can survive.

Sources

[1] Pokémon Database — Ice type
[2] Pokémon Database — Steel type
[3] Pokémon Database — Rock type
[4] Pokémon Database — Ghost type
[5] Pokémon Database — Fairy type
[6] Dittobase — Best Fighting-type Attackers in Pokémon GO
[7] Dittobase — Best Rock-type Attackers in Pokémon GO
[8] Dittobase — Best Steel-type Attackers in Pokémon GO
[9] Dittobase — Best Fire-type Attackers in Pokémon GO
Type effectiveness verified against the standard 18-type chart introduced in Generation VI (Pokémon X/Y, 2013) — unchanged in every mainline game since. Pokémon GO uses different multiplier values (1.6x super effective, 0.625x resisted) but the same weak/resist type assignments.

Michael R.

I've been playing video games for over 20 years, spanning everything from early PC titles to modern open-world games. I started Switchblade Gaming to publish the kind of accurate, well-researched guides I always wanted to find — built on primary sources, tested in-game, and kept up to date after patches. I currently focus on Minecraft and Pokémon GO.