Key Takeaway
To evolve Growlithe, you’ll need to use a Fire Stone on it.
Despite there being many new ways to evolve Pokémon in Pokémon Legends: Arceus, the way to evolve Growlithe hasn’t changed. You don’t need a specific move or attain a certain level—all you’ll need is an Elemental Stone.
Table Of Contents
What You Need to Evolve Growlithe
The item you need to evolve Growlithe is a Fire Stone. Once you have one in your inventory and a Growlithe in your party, you can combine them. Simply select the Fire Stone and use it on your Growlithe. This will cause them to immediately evolve into Arcanine.
How to Get Fire Stones
The easiest way to get a Fire Stone is to buy one from Simona in Jubilife Village. She sells them for 1,000 Merit Points each. To get Merit Points, you’ll need to find and return lost satchels. Each lost satchel you return will give you somewhere between 50 to 100 Merit Points.
If you’re lucky, you can potentially buy one from Ginter, who hangs out near the front of Galaxy Hall. However, his inventory is randomized, so you’re far from guaranteed to find one here. When Ginter does have a Fire Stone in stock, he’ll have it listed as a “Flame-Patterned Rock” and it will cost $5,000.
Alternatively, you can potentially find Fire Stones while exploring space-time distortions. On the ground in space-time distortions, among the many Red, Green, and Blue Shards, there will sometimes be evolution items—like Fire Stones. Although, these are rare, so don’t use this as your primary method of obtaining Fire Stones.
Reasons to Use Hisuian Arcanine on Your Team
Upon evolving into Arcanine, your Pokémon will gain Rock-typing in addition to being Fire-type. While this will let Arcanine deal more damage with Rock-type attacks, Rock-typing in this case is a pretty big liability.
Pure Fire-types, like regular Arcanine, are only weak to Ground, Rock, and Water-type attacks. However, Fire and Rock-types are weak to those three elements as well as Fighting-type moves. Furthermore, the double weaknesses to Ground and Water will make Arcanine take four times as much damage as opposed to simply twice as much.
Although Hisuian Arcanine suffers more than it benefits from Rock-typing, it at least has decent stats. Overall, Arcanine has balanced stats with none of them being low enough to be a negative trait. On top of that, Arcanine’s Attack stat is pretty high and definitely usable.
What’s more, Hisuian Arcanine has a great move pool. This allows it to equip many solid coverage moves to deal with a variety of threats.
The Best Moves for Hisuian Arcanine in Pokémon Legends: Arceus
To start, all the moves Arcanine learns through leveling up are pretty good. However, the last five it learns (from level 21 to 47) this way are the best:
- Rock Slide [Rock-type] (75 base power)
- Raging Fury [Fire-type] (90 base power)
- Crunch [Dark-type] (80 base power)
- Double-Edge [Normal-type] (100 base power)
- Flare Blitz [Fire-type] (100 base power)
Furthermore, Arcanine can learn damage-dealing moves from 11 different types via the move tutor. This means that you’ll always be able to give them a versatile moveset to deal with a ton of different threats effectively. With that said, some are definitely more usable than others.
You should focus on teaching Arcanine physical moves over special ones, as Arcanine’s Attack stat is noticeably higher than its Special Attack stat. However, its Special Attack stat isn’t too low, meaning that special damage-dealing moves can still be viable against certain enemies.
Here’s a breakdown of the best moves that Arcanine can learn from the move tutor:
- Iron Head [Steel-type] (80 base power)
- Flamethrower [Fire-type] (80 base power)
- Wild Charge [Electric-type] (85 base power)
- Play Rough [Fairy-type] (85 base power)
- Outrage [Dragon-type] (90 base power)
- Iron Tail [Steel-type] (100 base power)
- Stone Edge [Rock-type] (100 base power)
- Giga Impact [Normal-type] (120 base power)
- Hyper Beam [Normal-type] (120 base power)
Tips for Selecting the Best Moveset
Through leveling up and move tutoring, Arcanine can only learn a single status move: Rest (via the move tutor). If you want your Arcanine to have an HP recovery move, feel free to use it, as Rest is moderately viable in Pokémon Legends: Arceus in many cases.
However, you’ll likely get the most from your Hisuian Arcanine by teaching them four damage-dealing moves, as more type coverage means better type matchups against potential foes. Give Arcanine four damage-dealing moves of different types to let your flaming hound sweep NPC trainers with ease in most cases.
The only threats you should be wary of are those with powerful Ground-type and Water-type moves. Due to Arcanine’s severe weaknesses against these types, they can potentially get knocked out in a single hit if you aren’t careful.
