>>46247315Stealth Rock only exists in Smogon, it's an extremely small facet of the problem.
The problem with Fire Types, at least pre-Fairy, was that every fucking Fire type wanted to be a mixed attacker with Fire's trash movepool and just got walled out by both Physical and Special walls they were weak against.
Theoretically Grass coverage should have been the answer to common Rock, Ground, and Water walls for Fire types, but almost no Fire types had the SpAtk to make use of their coverage options or the bulk to set up Solar Beams (which is why every fucking Gen3 Fire type has Sunny Day or Drought). So Fire needed to be mixed with another strong Atk type to get an optimal mixed movepool, and only Fighting worked without exacerbating the problem with typical Fire checks, while all the other logical type mixes (Ground, Rock, Steel, Flying) would just make the Pokemon of that type worse against their checks.
Except Houndoom, Houndoom is an absolute god and shits all over Arcanine but is literally never available in any generation before postgame so nobody remembers it.
