Dialga is Pokémon Brilliant Diamond’s signature Legendary Pokémon. As you might expect, you can only obtain the Temporal Pokémon in that game! For more information, check out our Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl version exclusives guide. As a Legendary Pokémon, Dialga is one of the strongest party members in BDSP. It boasts a wealth of helpful strengths, including a solid defensive typing and a wide movepool. Without further ado, then, let’s jump right into today’s moveset guide!
Singles & Doubles
The first moveset we’ve got here is for Singles, and it’s a rather defensive one at that. Looking at Dialga’s base stats, it’s got 100 HP, 120 Defense, and 100 Sp. Defense. With that in mind, we invest fully into Sp. Defense to help Dialga more easily take special hits. The last four points go into Defense — it won’t help much, but it’s there just in case. Dragon Pulse and Stealth Rock are self-explanatory; a reliable STAB and a helpful entry hazard, respectively. Thunder, while inaccurate, slams Pokémon like Skarmory, Kyogre, and Manaphy. On the other hand, Ice Beam is a tad weaker but hits Garchomp and Gliscor for quadruple damage. Roar phases out opponents and removes their stat boosts, while Substitute helps protect Dialga for at least one turn. We do recommend using Roar over Substitute, though.
Dialga is much worse in BDSP Doubles than it is in Sword & Shield Doubles. This is because there’s no Weakness Policy! In Sword & Shield, you’d run Weakness Policy Dialga and let an opponent use Bulldoze to decrease its speed (thus making Dialga faster in Trick Room) and sharply raise its offenses. Instead, we’re going with a general utility setup. The Adamant Orb increases the power of Draco Meteor and Flash Cannon, and then Earth Power nails Steel-types and Fire-types. Protect is standard in Doubles, and completely defends Dialga from incoming damage for one turn. You could run Telepathy as the ability here — as mentioned before, there’s no Weakness Policy, so there’s little reason to have your teammate purposefully attack Dialga. Otherwise, Pressure reduces the PP of opponents’ moves more than usual.
If you have any questions on how to make your Dialga battle-ready (or perhaps would like to have one traded to you), feel free to join our Discord server! We’ve got an active base of Pokémon players who can help you out if you like. As a reminder, our movesets aren’t fully optimized for competitive play — that is to say, you won’t often see EVs tailored to outspeed certain Pokémon and such. Instead, they’re sort of optimized for a step below competitive; for players who want to handily beat their friends but don’t want to play in an actual metagame. We hope this was helpful to you, though! Stay tuned for more moveset guides in the future.
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