Town gaming

I'm spending a few days in a town visiting relatives. It's an interesting experience. In ways it's harder to play here compared to my experience from a rural village -- virtually no resources at all only forces you to a minimum of playing in the first place, which while boring isn't difficult.

Now, however, I'm in a 30k population town, which is a far cry from the 650k population city I'm used to.

30k is enough to merit a decent number of gyms and stops, but the experience is extremely different. Spawn to stop/gym ratio is entirely different, which plays havoc with my poke-balls. Ie the number of poke-balls I have available is falling like a brick from an aeroplane.

Obviously the same would be true for potions and revives in the long run, but the friends system together with field researches make his less of a problem. Add that the locals playing here have nothing comparable to place into gyms or attack gyms with.

Bringing a healthy number of golden razzberries into this town further skews the balance, but in the end I'd run out of those as well as the low availability of level five raids prevents me from bulking up on resources.

All in all gym battling is a very different experience here from what I'm used to. To a certain degree you could argue that it's akin to playing a different game.

Well, that's all for this time.

Gym territory and reputation part six

So, I promised a piece about side effects.

The most obvious ones follow the saying that misery loves company.

You're likely to attract a whole lot of enemy fire. People simply dislike to see status quo changed in a negative way.

However, you're also likely to see occasional help from team mates who normally wouldn't play at those gyms.


A third side effect occurs if the gyms become heavily contested. Multiplayer boss raids will become easier to run at the gyms due to the increased attention those gym occupy in people's minds.


The fourth is simply a matter of reputation. Contested gyms do get a reputation, and some of that reputation will cling to the players most active in infamous gyms -- and that was the main point from the very beginning, wasn't it?

Gym territory and reputation part five

So you've decided on maintaining a gym territory. This translates into maintaining a bad reputation.

For this you need:

• Persistence
• Visibility
• Friends
• Maintainability

Persistence

The previous posts covered this. You attack enemy gyms and defend your own. You do this even when it's boring like hell, or just give up on those gyms.

Visibility

You need to be out there. If you've decided on a temporal aspect for your territory (in my personal case evenings and nights), you'll naturally be attacking enemy gyms. However, don't forget to get out there from time to time and defend them on-site.

If the gyms you're targetting is close to where you are, be it living, education or work, use that opportunity whenever possible to go on-site and refill a partially attacked gym. By partially I'm referring to a gym that lost a couple of defenders but were succesfully berried for ten minutes. This is especially important when one of the ousted defenders belonged to you. No one likes to see a defending player returning to a berried gym.

From time to time you ought to get to gyms outside of the conditions you've set up for your territory. Be it boss raids or tearing down a gym outside of temporal conditions is you've set those up.

If at all possible try to set the gyms up for your team prior to boss raids. This is especially true if the gyms are considered central for wherever you're playing.

Friends

Maintaining gym territory simply isn't done by a single player. Sure, you might run six accounts pouring cash into each of them, but if you do then you don't need to read this post in the first place.

Three players should be considered a minimum for maintaining territory. Half a dozen is, obviously, preferred. The territory I'm part of keeping up is primarily handled by four players.

Your group of friends should keep up a live means of communicating. A chat is perfect, but don't forget to meet in real life. This is especially true for attacking gyms when they're controlled by enemy teams. Two or three players tear down a gym in no time at all to a fantastically reduced cost in time and resources.

Make your friends into friends in the game as well. Up to ten percent added damage to a berried blissey does wonders for demotivating a defending player.

Players being physically close to the territory are best for being secondary attackers. By that I mean that players needing to spend time to get to the gyms should start attacks and report this over whatever communication channel you use. It's a matter of a few minutes for the secondary attacker to join.

Make sure you've more or less agreed on the conditions set up for the territory.

Maintainability

Potions, revives, berries and time are the deciding factors for handling gyms. Add attackers and defenders into the equation.

You need to dare emptying your bag of items you don't use to capacity. You also need to spin stops and gyms like mad to keep up your item-income. If you're serious about gyms this probably translates into discarding pokeballs in favour of space for potions, revives and berries.

You want to open 20 or as close to 20 gifts every day. They're an important source for max revives and max potions.

Make realistic conditions for the territory. More often than not this translates into adding temporal conditions. If your territory includes a university with lots of active enemy players you're unlikely to be able to hold the gyms during daytime, and conversely if you're a student there as well as your friendly players then make certain daytime is part of your territory.

Don't try to keep a territory larger than the number of maxed out blissey, chansey and snorlax you can place into them. You might get away with two grade A defenders in a gym or two, but your goal should be to have all three in a gym.

Next post on some interesting side effects.

Gym territory and reputation part four

With the influx of golden razz berries strangled you'll either need to boss raid a lot or feed your gyms smarter.

Assuming that you don't have the option to join five or more boss raids on a daily basis we'll have a closer look at smart berry feeding. Sure, if you can collect thirty plus berries a day then go ahead and spam those gyms.


Now, let's say you're limited to ten to fifteen berries a day. Any less and you're basically unable to defend gyms. Free to play simply doesn't cut it. So three or four raids a day. Yup, that means you're buying coins. Two or three if the opposition isn't all that serious about taking back the gyms.


Stick to feeding the big three. This especially if the gym you're defending sees a lot of traffic. You should be able to allow the crap to get ousted and see a new set of crap inserted. Most attackers drop off when the gym is repopulated.

In fact most attackers leave the gym if the blissey receives one golden razz berry. So that first berry is by far the most important.


Create a chat for handling gyms. After all it's impossible to reliably defend gyms alone, or at least with one account. During the occasions where attacking players get serious one feeder just doesn't cut it, but two can very often shut down the gym indefinitely.


Dare to see your gyms going down, but also be prepared to get out there and fix the damage if it's done while the conditions for the gym 'being yours' are met. Unless you're defending the gym prior to a juicy raid, just let it go down whenever you know that fellow players are inbound.


Next post on maintaining a bad reputation.

Gym territory and reputation part three

So, how to build that reputation.

Attacking

The first half basically requires you to spin gyms and stops as well as opening presents like mad. Cause you're out there tearing down enemy gyms, and it's going to cost you lots and lots of potions and revives.

It doesn't have to be 24/7, but there needs to be a system to it. Like, for example, you're attacking between 6 pm and 9 pm.

Worst case you'll be seeing an absurd amount of golden razz berries fed into the gyms you're targetting. Doesn't matter. Either they go down or you're not building that reputation.

This is why you don't want to do this alone. Two attackers cut the time and resources needed to one third of what's required of a solo attacker.


Now, most would argue that attacking gyms on a schedule makes you predictable and easier to launch berries against. That's absolutely correct. This is not about a suprise assault on one or more gyms. This is all about establishing a reputation. Predictable is good as long as the end result invariably is that the gyms go down.

You want the experience I have with my seven closest gyms. I attack during day time and I can expect a lot of berries thrown after me. I attack evenings and most defenders will simply yield the gym even if said defenders did indeed throw a few golden razz berries into the gym. Because if it's evening those gyms are going down. End of story.


Atacking gyms is also a matter of presence. Preferably you live close to the gyms you're interested in. If one of them gets miscoloured when it's supposed to belong to your team, then you go out there and rectify the error.


Last, attacking gyms does contain a certain amount of realism. If you're unable to control them 24/7, then don't even try. Just establish a schedule when they're going down and allow enemy teams to control them off hours, according to your definition of off hours.

Next post on defence.

Gym territory and reputation part two

So I wrote that apart from persistence you need time, money and a bloody awful reputation.

It takes time to build and maintain that bloody awful reputation, and making use of all that time takes a lot of persistence.

Obviously you'll need top notch defenders to place into the gyms you're trying to hold, but in all honesty that probably only amounts to half a dozen superb defenders. You'll go a long way with three maxed blissey, two snorlax and one chansey.

If the cluster you try to hold is larger than half a dozen gyms, well then the number of premium defenders needed increases.


Anyway, money. Why money?

While you can tear down gyms in a sustainable way by spinning lots and lots of stops and gyms the daily free raid pass simply won't suffice for your defensive needs. An average of two or three raids per day is probably needed to supply you with the bare minimum requirement in terms of golden razz berries, and this is assuming you basically don't use them for catching pokemon at all.

Look forward to popping a dozen to twenty berries into gyms on a daily basis while you build that bloody awful reputation.


Next time I'll write a short post on how you start building that reputation.

Gym territory and reputation

Just because I love to necro my dead blog.

This post is about why you should play the player rather than playing the game. The context is gym battling.

The best gym defender is not blissey.

While a maxed out high IV blissey, supported by similar chansey, snorlax, and machamp-hating tertiaty defenders sandwiched between them, are indeed fantastic defenders they still take a back seat position compared to a bloody awful reputation.

I'm assuming you want to establish or maintain some kind of hegenomy over a limited number of gyms. I'm also assuming that you are more than one player, or, all gods forbid, running multiple accounts (and yes, I dislike that but it's not a personal deal breaker).

You'll need

• persistence
• persistence
• persistence
• time
• money
• a bloody awful reputation

That's it. And that's a lot.

To give me a reason to kick this blog alive again I'll stop here and expand on this theory in a few posts the coming week.

Restoring bugs

As in Niantic actually restored a bug after having fixed it.

Welcome back to 24 hour partial lock-out from gyms you have boss raided. This time it's even worse than before. About every second terminated battle results in you having to revive two pokemon, out of which one hasn't even seen combat.

When to design it wrong

A very short strategy note here.

Common sense dictates that you place blissey as the first defender in a gym. There is, however one corner case scenario when you might want to reconsider.

To begin with, this is only done withi  context of a gym raiding community.

If you have reason to believe fellow team members will get physically close to an attacked gym in some five to fifteen minutes, and when you believe this to be true for long periods of time, then start with absolute crap in the gym.

Preferably hard hitting crap, but basically anything could go in first.


Now why would we want to do this?


1) Gyms lock for ten minutes after the first defender is kicked out. Nornally that means the blissey is kicked out. By placing shite in the gym first those ten minutes start to count down with the best defender still available for receiving berries.

2) If you're lucky you'll receive push notifications that the gym is under attack before the defending pokemon are already ousted. In such an occasion the first defender basically acts as an early warning system.


Lastly, this is very much a corner case scenario. After all it requires someone to act as a sacificial lamb, but it's hugely fun when you pull it off.

New to the extreme end-game, gym raider, raiding

I won't go into how you hulk into a gym on your own. That has been covered in detail before and isn't really part of gym raiding.

For a raid you'd expect to be

• 2
• 3 - 4
• 5 -6

players attacking more than one gym during one raiding session.

The two player attack is basically more or less the same as going alone with the main difference that the time needed to down a gym is cut in half and the cost in potions and revives cut to between a third to 40% compared to attacking alone.

The reason for the large rebate in potions and revives is that several defenders never get to fire off a charge attack at all.

For undefended gyms just shave off the first defenders, usually a blissey followed by snorlax or chansey. One attacker doesn't participate in the ousting fight but rather continues into the next defender.

For partially defended gyms, ie an occasional berry fed to the defender, both attackers got to work on the same defender, including the ousting fight.

Heavily defended gyms either have to be given up, or you'll need to restort to taking each defender down in two fights to either kick defenders out or at least force defending players to feed berries between each fight.

Moving between gyms after kicking defenders down one notch is another viable tactics. When the warning signal goes out a defending player needs to locate which gym is under attack and feed the defender a berry before it's gone. Quite often this takes more time than what's needed to enter fight number three and finish it.

Do keep attackers super effective or neutral against the current defender.

Three of four attackers can kick out each defender instantly, but you may not want to do this for some reason. In that case two attackers should keep going on the first defender in the gym while the remaining attacker(s) continue and hurt defenders further in the gym.

For heavily defended gyms you might need to keep every attacker rolling on the first defender to either push the cost for feeding golden razz berries into the unsustainable zone or kick defenders out by virtue of running defending players out of feeding slots.

Attacking mons are preferably super effective or neutral against the current defender.

Five or more attacker should normally avoid kicking defeners out instantly. It's more efficient to just brute force through the gym. Two or three players hammer the first defender into obvlivion and the rest make forays into the gym. It quickly becomes unsustainable to keep up coordinated feeding even if you're several defending players trying to keep the gym up remotely.

In the scenario where defending players do a comparatively decent job at feeding it might be a good idea to either send an attacker or two to the next gym, or simply shift gym altogether. In all likelyhood you've consumed a lot of feeding slots, and the second gym can't be defended at all.

Personally I prefer to just keep smashing into each gym. The cost for feeding a gym attacked by a full raid team is insane, and by the time you hit gym number three or four some of the defending players start depleting their berry storage.

This is basically attacking player motivation rather than pokemon motivation. For more players it's simply too scary to watch fifty berries drop to under forty in less than half an hour. Don't forget that many players actually use golden razz berries for catching raid bosses. They don't have berry supplies anywhere as large as the players who stack up on berries with a focus on gym raiding.

Also, while it's fun to know that one defending player in your team sits on 300 or more golden razz berries, that player can only feed each defender ten berries, and even a maxed out perfect blissey will see those slots consumed in under ten minutes.

Attacking mons are either sweepers or machamp. Using machamp against gardevoir is perfectly viable for a full raid. More often than not you won't find out what charge attack a defending pokemon has.

Boss raids

Notably a gym defended prior to an attractive boss raid usually can't be downed. You should expect players on site dropping the occasional berry into the gym without any semblance of coordination. The sheer number of berries fed into the gym will normally make it impossible to take it down.

Multistepping the gym also becomes impossible since attackers are just about everywhere in the gym, and you can't count on managing the synchronized endings of fights needed to kick a defender out in one go.

In this scenario either skip attacking the gym altogether or aim at maximising the cost in golden razz berries.

New to the extreme end-game, gym raider, gym oddities

Let's have a look at some gym oddities.


A fun one. Sometimes when you try to join the very last fight in a gym and the defender goes down before you can join battle the entire screen goes blue and you look at the data for a CP 9999 hitmonchan. Exit game and restart.


A stupid one. When you open a gym to see what's inside and leave it the entire game freezes. Exit game and restart.


A crippling one. More often than not, if you refuse to join the fight after you kicked a defender out of the gym, then when you try to enter combat again you'll get an error 29. It lasts for ten minutes during which you can't attack the gym. You either:

• wait ten minutes
• wait for the first defender in the gym to be kicked out

If you're raiding this means you have to tell your group that the fist defender needs to be shave out of the gym, or you'll have to do something else for ten minutes.

An misinformative one. You try to assign a defender to a gym and fail because 'the gym is currently under attack'. Next time you're busy kicking out that lonesone blissey, and when you finish the first of three fights you notice that it goit company by a snorlax.

It's got nothing to do with 'is currently under attack'.

When the first defender is kicked out a ten minute timer starts during which new defenders cannot be assigned to the gym.

Observe 'first'.

When you kick out defender number two the timer doesn't reset to a fresh ten minutes but continue to blithely tick down. Ten minutes after you kicked the first defender out it's perfectly possible to assign new defenders to the gym. This means you could be busy kicking defender number four out when the gym suddenly starts to get repopulated.

Wait. It's even crazier. If, for some reason, the ten minute timer counts down to zero before the gym is entirely cleaned out, then whenever a defender does get kicked out a new ten minute timers starts.

New to the extreme end-game, gym raider, berry feeding

Feeding mechanism

You can feed any pokemon in a friendly gym you're standing close to
You can feed any pokemon remotely in a gym when you have assigned a defender

Nanab berries are best for adding motivation. Razz berries and pinab berries give the same amount. Remote feeding a gym that is 'far away' will cut the motivation increase by 75%, but remote feeding a gym that is just out of range for normal interaction will yield the full value.

In either case you can only feed ten unique pokemon per half hour, and only ten berries per pokemon.

Observe 'unique'. If your snorlax in a gym gets kicked out after you fed it ten berries in rapid succession and are unable to feed it any more, it's still the same pokemon. Assigning it to a different gym won't allow you a new round of ten berries until that half an hour has passed.


There are basically two kinds of berry feeding.

• Trash bin
• Defence

Trash bin

Trash bin feeding is basically getting rid of your surplus standard berries for a small amount of stardust, badge XP and a shot at an extra candy.

My advice is to target gyms you're not standing in and keep track of your feeding slots. Especially if you're on the hunt for candy.

A newly assigned defender that has lost one fight can be restored to almost full motivation the first time you feed it three standard berries.

Unless you feel confident that a gym you have assigned a defender into won't come under attack any tie soon I'd advice you to avoid trash bin feeding the primary defenders in it.

That said I usually go through the gyms I have defenders in during evenings if I have a large surplus of standard berries. If they've lost marginal motivation I remote feed them exactly one berry each and make certain I have four or five feedings slots free in terms of the number of pokemon I can feed during one half an hour period. The yield is around 100 motivation.

Defence

This is where golden razz berries come into the picture

There are primarily three types of defensive feeding

• Preemptive
• Boss raid defence
• Gym defence

Preemptive feeding is done when the gym is peaceful but important defenders have fallen low enough in motivation to be kicked out after one lost battle. You decide wether to drop the gym entirely or ready it for future attacks.

Preemptive feeding is speculative. See it as an insurance. If the gym doesn't come under attack you lost a golden razz berry. However, the reason it never came under attack might just have been your feeding one or two defenders.

Boss raid defence is what happens the last twenty minutes or so prior to a legendary raid boss. It goes on for a full hour prior to an EX raid. The team that owns the gym pours in golden razz berries while just about everyone else hulks into the gym.

It's horribly expensive in terms of berries and a lot of fun. You're usually better off feeding everything in the gym. Maybe allow some moronic insertion of pikachu with a funny hat or crap like that to be kicked out. Defend the remaining five and assign something useful after ten minutes.

Gym defence is the reaction to a gym raid. Two or more players attack the gym and those in control try to stave off the attack.

Focus on blissey, chansey and snorlax. Especially if you have the opportinuty to have friendly players arriving on the scene. They can replace secondary defenders if you manage to keep the gym up for ten minutes.

Unless the attackers multistep the gym, in which case you're unlikely to be able to defend it anyway feed a berry every second combat against two attacker (or a solo player for that matter). Against four or more players you need to feed after every fight or you're going to see defenders drop out during the chaos.

For all practical purposes a gym attacked by a full raid team can't be defended remotely. The cost in potions and revives is neglible for the attackers, and there will be fights going on all over the gym simultaneously while two or three attackers continuously tear down the first defender in line.

Never feed every defender in a gym if you're defending a cluster of gyms. The attacking team will simply check when six feeding slots have been used and tear down the next gym while you watch in frustration. Even if you're spreading your defensive efforts your are, literally spread thin. What was once the ability to feed a specific defender 20 berries drops to 10 since one defending player ran out of feeding slots.

Also, make sure you can afford the cost in golden razz berries. We usually see either very few berries being used or well above fifty when we attack groups of gyms. Obviosuly it's not a single defender feeding all 50, but still. At one occasion we attacked through upwards to 200 berries. With that kind of numbers you'll run anyone but the most deidicated player dry on berries.

Don't forget that you want a minimum of golden razz berries left for actually throwing after raid bosses should something especially juicy pop up on your screen.

The first golden razz berry, or first group of berries fed into gym is the most important. My experience is that about half of the attacks cease immediately when prime defenders return to full motivation.

Next, very short article will be about gym oddities.

New to the extreme end-game, gym raider, gym defence

Gym defence is a matter of defenders, design and traffic density. While the article, and the one it links to, is a little dated, the main points still hold true.

Since the last article covered the bare bones defenders we'll have a closer look at design.


Whenever I'm bolding something it means it's the best pick whenever more than one is viable.


Design is a function of traffic density. Or at least it should be. I've read all kinds of crap stating that the same design is optimal for every gym, and that design being you should avoid motivation decay at all costs.

Lot's of camel dung being smoked there.


For an extremely low traffic density gym just assign whatever is in your recent list and you plan to transfer anyway. It's been a few days since anyone was here, and maybe within a week someone will visit the gym and kick you out.
Actually you want to avoid dropping your cared for chansey here. It'll drop to zero eventually, and what's worse, you risk getting it locked in.


For a standard low traffic density gym, which usually includes even central gyms when night is closing in, you can apply the numbers game and search for CP 1000 to 1999 pokemon to insert. I personally can't be arsed to do that. When the attack comes at five o'clock I'm usually asleep anyway.
These gyms are the only ones where the mainstream moronicity is applicable.


For a high traffic density gym you use maxed out defenders of top quality. These are also more or less the gyms gym raiders are truly interested in.
You expect the gym to come under attack with a depressing regularity.

Basically it means that a blissey and at least one of snorlax and chansey should be assigned to the gym. Preferably all three.


Sandwiching

The dilemma with these three defenders is that machamp is the preferred attacker for all three, which is the reason you should consider sandwiching in defenders which are problematic for machamp.

Clefable and gardevoir are your best bet since machamp is ineffective against these and they are supereffective against machamp with STAB for Dazzling Gleam to boot.

However, a maxed out example of the latter could be out of your grasp, and you may already have put in a lot of resources into vaporeon, lapras, steelix or donphan since before the release of the generation three pokemon.

Maybe you're pushing a milotic. If so I recommend you to stick with Waterfall / Surf despite the information given elsewhere. Reason being that attackers are far more likely to hulk into your water type defender with an electric type pokemon, read raikou, than using an exeggutor. The main culprit here is the overabundance of gyardos in gyms, and grass type pokemon simply doesn't compete when it comes to shredding gyarados.

Of these I recommend that you keep lapras out of the gyms until rayquaza vasnishes as a legendary raid boss.

A Counter / Play Rough donphan would do the job.


Observe that sandwiching only helps with cutting down attackers who walz right through the gym, and only if they're two or less.


Bulking up

If your local meta is defined by shaving then sandwiching won't help much. You're better off either bulking up och going for the throat.

Bulking up is primarily effective where you very seldom see more than two players attacking and shaving a gym.

This means dumping vaporeon, lapras and, surprisingly, wigglytuff into the gym.

If you're using your brain instead of smoking camel dung you're running with a Pound / Play Rough or Dazzling Gleam setup for wigglytuff. Wigglytuff is a fairy / normal type pokemon, so it's doubly moronic to suggest that you pick Feint Attack as your primary attack.

STAB pumps Pound to the same level as Feint Attack, and since there is very little reason for an attacker to swap out machamp (due to doing neutral damage to wigglytuff) and start digging up a steel type pokemon, you don't want a dark type attack which is ineffective against fighting type pokemon, which is why Feint Attack sucks.

Why not have a steel type pokemon in the standard attacking party? Well, this is the bulking up meta, and you're having vaporeon in every gym, and steel type attacks are patently crap against water type defenders.


Going for the throat

There are comparatively few gyms where you play, but pokestops are everywhere. This means all players are starved for potions and revives.

In this meta you want to pump out as much hurt as possible.

You'll be assigning some previously rather dubious defenders to gyms for this reason, and dragonite with Dragon Tail / Outrage is your best friend here. Despite battles taking next to no time this pokemon is worth pouring golden razz berries into in this meta.

Slaking suddenly starts to look like a decent defender since Play Rough is easy to miss, and it will wipe out the attacking machamp. Notable drawback is that it must be fed a berry between fights to do any damage at all.

Gardevoir and Espeon can be used for the combination of Confusion and superior attack stats. Tyranitar negates Espeon though.

If you're lucky enough to have a legacy Exeggutor with Confusion, just give it Seed Bomb as a charge attack and it's ready to go.

A Waterfall / Crunch gyarados will inflict a surprising amount of damage to the attacking electeic type poekmon during the very few seconds the fight lasts. If you're currently out of dragonites you can afford assigning to gyms this might be an option.


All in all I'd aim for a combination of sandwiching and going for the throat. Save vaporeon for relative outlier gyms.

Feed berries every second combat unless you're feeding a slaking or there is intensive agressive traffic into the gym. In that case either give up or pour in a berry every fight. Otherwise you'll end up losing defenders further into the gym as staggered attacks take down defenders inside the gym simultaneously.

The first golden razz berry is your greatest deterrent. My experience is that it immediately kills off half of the attacks. For the rest you're likely going to need coordinated feeding, which means you need to be in contact with a second defender who can take over when you're running out of feedling slots.

More on berry feeding in the next article.

New to the extreme end-game, gym raider, defenders

In the end your defenders pretty much define who you are when it comes to gym raiding. For most players the defenders are their outward face. They are the pokemon other players see and associate with your player nickname.

I won't go into the fun defenders, the ones you use to build a thematic gym. We do that from time to time. It's enjoyable, a lot of giggles and laughs, but it's not really gym raiding.


A real defender is as maxed out as you can have it. Just forget the crap about keeping your defenders at low CP in order to minimize motivation decay. That's for fire and forget gyms. If you're interested in low motivation decay then you're not really interested in defending the gym in the first place, and thus you're probably not a gym raider.

Sure, you could have both. Defenders you use for contested gyms and "defenders" you drop into isolated gyms and don't see until several days later because no one else visited the gym.


At level 38 you should have amassed stardust and candy enough to max out two of the prime defenders in the game.

• Blissey (Zen Headbutt / Dazzling Gleam)
• Chansey (Zen Headbutt / Dazzling Gleam)
• Snorlax (Zen Headbutt / Heavy Slam) There is a better legacy charge attack, Body Slam

Until you have the resources needed to max out multiples of these you're going to need secondary defenders. Aim at a total of six defenders since a dozen maxed out pokemon should be perfectly doable at level 38.

Remember the last article. You needed six attackers as well.

I'd go for three of these:

• Vaporeon (Water Gun / Aqua Tail or Water Pulse)
• Milotic (Waterfall / Surf)
• Donphan (Counter / Heavy Slam)
• Steelix (Iron Tail / Heavy Slam)
• Lapras (Frost Breath / Ice Beam) There is a better legacy fast attack, Ice Shard

If at all possible aim at maxing out one tertiary defender as well

• Gardevoir (Confusion / Dazzling Gleam)
• Clefable /Zen Headbutt / Dazzling Gleam)

The tertiaries are all about screwing machamp over.

Now you should have six or seven defenders to drop into gyms.

After that the slow hunt for more blissey, snorlax and chansey starts. Unless you've been lucky enough to chunk up on snorlax or chansey candy you're in for a grueling grind.

Next article is about gym defence. Defence, not defenders.

New to the extreme end-game, gym raider, attackers

Unless you're happy only assigning defenders to gyms someone else tore down, in which case you're not a gym raider at all, then you need an attacking line-up in order to be able to assign anything at all.

First of all we need to define the term gym raider.

It's not a solo player. Don't get me wrong here. Many of the best players I've met out there are solo players, but they aren't gym raiders. They simply lack that aggregated skill set.


A gym raider is a player who attacks gyms together with other players of the same team and more often than not defends conquered gyms together with those players. The attacking part is vital. Gym raiders who don't defend gyms just tend not to stay in them for very long.

Note the plural. Gyms as well as players. If you're three players walking down to that lonely gym every day you're not raiders. You're making certain that gym stays in your posession.


So, let's move on to the bare bones minimum attacking force. You want to at least be able to fill out one predefined attacking team now when we have access to this nifty party beta.

Talking about parties. I know it sucks, but you just have to wipe that party from time to time and create the same one placing it last since Niantic, in their divine wisdom, decided to list the parties in the reverse order you get access to them when you want to use them.

You want that party to be the first one to show up when you swipe left. More on why in a later article.


Six pokemon, with 15 attack stat if possible. Bolded are best.

• Machamp (Counter / Dynamic Punch) x 2
• Dragonite or Rayquaza (Dragon Tail / Outrage) x 1
• Zapdos (Charge Beam / Thunderbolt) or Raikou (Thunder Shock / Wild Charge) x 1
• Two more attackers

The six pokemon above are needed. Just get them maxed out.

Why those?

Gyms nowdays are populated by blissey, snorlax and, quite often, chansey. Add tyranitar, aggron, lapras and rhydon. Fighting attacks rule the day. I personally run with a third machamp as one of the two extras. Avoid flying type pokemon since machamp is ineffective against those. So no dragonites and gyarados as your targets. Also avoid fairy type pokemon like clefable and gardevoir. You'll get wiped out.

Dragon type attacks are largely unresisted. More often than not, when in doubt, attack with a dragon. Both dragonite and rayquaza come with superior attack stats combined with good to decent bulk. Dragontypes are an expensive but perfectly decent option when you're cleaning out dragonites in gyms. Sure, you'll take a beating, but you'll also make quick work of the defender without resorting to digging up that ice type attacker.

An electric type attacker is sweet to have for the ever present gyarados and vaporeon in gyms. Electric is also largey unresisted whenever your dragonite/rayquaza runs into problems.

The two extras depend on your local meta game. Where I live that chansey is almost always inserted into gyms together with the mandatory blissey and snorlax, and players here have learned to pump up their defenders. Thus I run with a third machamp.

For some obscure reason rhydon got extremely, and golem quite, popular locally, so I've been running with an exeggutor (Bullet Seed / Solar Beam) as the last party member since it absolutely destroys rhydon and golem. Now we're seeing more and more fairy type pokemon, so I'm thinking of swapping that one out in favour of an aggron (Iron Tail / Heavy Slam) or metagross (Bullet Punch / Flash Cannon).

Another place might see good use for a kyogre or gyarados (Waterfall / Hydro Pump). Maybe you're overdosing on plants locally, in which case I could see a use for moltres or entei (Fire Spin / Overheat)

No matter what, your local huting ground will have it's own idiosyncracies. The two last slots are for handling those. You want those two attackers. Don't cheat on them.

Max out that attacking line-up. You can go play the threshold game for boss raiding for all I care, or use level 33 attackers for rarely encountered defenders. But don't cheat on your primary attacking line-up. Level 40 they go. It's six pokemon for crying put loud.

Sure, as you collect more stardust and recall dinging level 40 yourself with a sense of nostalgica, you'll wind up with a plethora of maxed out attackers, but then you're hardly new to the extreme end game any longer.

Next article up will cover the bare bones defenders.

New to the extreme end-game, gym raider, bag

This is the first in a short series of articles about the new extreme end-game gym-raider.

Let's have a look at one archetypical player -- the avid gym-raider. Let's combine that archetype with a player who is also new to or closing in on the extreme end-game.

Level 38. That's the holy grail. It's the last level where the game gives a player any potential long-time benefits. At level 38 you can push a pokemon to level 40, and, well, that's it. From here on it's just about grinding for better material in terms of the number of attractive pokemon you have available.

Bag-size: 1500. This is the by far most powerful upgrade you can get in the game. Just max out your bag to minimise problems with how many items you have of one type. Upgrading your bag takes priority over anything else you can shop for coins.

Pokemon Storage: The number of pokemon you have plus 100. 1500 is nice to have, but it's not vital. However, under no circumstances do you want to sit with a really sought after pokeon caught without room to collect it. Players with Gotcha or Plus should aim for plus 200. You're likely to clean out your storage after a finished session rather than discarding low-grade pokemon on the go.


Pokeballs: Whatever ensures you don't run out of them. This is highly individual.

Pots and revives: 150 or more of each. You'll burn through them at a depressing rate if you go gym-raiding. Observe that the basic potion doesn't even count towards the number 150.

Golden Razz Berries: 100 or more. Defending a gym is expensive.

Other berries: Whatever floats your boat. I personally go for zero with the exception of Pinab Berries which I want around 20 of. Use friendly gyms as trash bins for excess berries. Target defenders of a kind where you want candy. Do overfeed them if you have a surplus of berries. You still get 20 stardust and a small chance for a candy.


Anything else is optional. Sure, I keep a minimum of premium raid passes, star pieces, lures and so on. but they're not actually needed for gym-raiding. These are items that make my gaming more enjoyable. Arguably star pieces and rare candies do help to a very large degree to keep your line-up top notch. As for lucky eggs. Use them until you hit 38. After that they cease to have any functional value what so ever.


I like massively overpowered legendary raids. They resupply my storage of revives and hyper potions. My stash of golden razz berries and rare candies, however, isn't impacted by the number of boss-raiders during a given raid. Note though that if you're prone to enter a boss-raid with the minimum players required you're likely to pay in terms of potions and revives rather than gain from boss-raiding.

For this reason I spend less time spinning stops and gyms in order to resupply on potions and revives.

I dislike going below half a dozen premium passes, but again this is individual. A healthy supply of lure modules and incense, a dozen or more of both, makes me a happier player. While I'm currently overdosing on star pieces I'd rather avoid going below half a dozen. Always having access to three hours worth of 150% stardust is the minimum for me.

When it comes to TM I discard down to 20 for Fast TM. I could probably discard down to 10 (as in I really ought to do that). You usually burn through your Charge TM quicker, so I have yet to discard those.

I personally try to stay below 100 rare candies, but I have full respect for those who want 245 candies. That gives you the opportunity to max out anything you just caught given enough stardust, which is 225000 star dust for a level 20 pokemon. And before anyone jumps in and says that you need 248 candies -- you can't catch anything without collecting three candies.

Observe that this is only true for pokemon you want to max out in their current form. There is a cost for evolving as well.

While stardust isn't something that takes up space in your bag it's still a limiting factor. I basically refuse to go below 225k stardust in order to be able to pump up anything I collect given enough candy to do so.

I keep one each of the evolve items. They will probably never see any use, but I can waste five bag slots.

Lucky eggs are a waste of bag space for me. I keep five as a gimmick since that's the number of lucky eggs I have left as level rewards. There is no rationale behind this, but hey, it's a game. You're supposed to have some fun. And yes, I immediately discard 25 lucky eggs when I shop the current big-pack.

Next article will be about the bare bones minimum for attacking gyms.

Full raid team

And we're talking gym raiding here, not boss raiding.

Standing six level 40 mangling a gym might be considered a minor overkill, but we got some interesting data anyway.

Berryfeeding is basically noticeable for blissey only. For other defenders the time it takes to leave the gym and reenter it is usually too long for the defender to survive the third combat. Ie the berry feeding player would need to feed a berry betwen each combat and still find out that sometimes a second combat had already occured.

Downing a gym including decent versions of the three big ones, 3.2k snorlax, 3.0k blissey and 1.3k chansey is quick work. Extremely quick work if it's not being fed berries. At no occasion was it possible to spin the gym before attacking it and spin it again after we had populated it fully. Ie time between first attack and last assigned pokemon is below five minutes.

The time used is so short that trying to three-step defenders to kill them in one go is a waste of time unless you verify that someone is actively berryfeeding a blissey at 3.1k or something like that, and even then brute forcing a fully motivated blissey is a matter of some fifteen seconds of time.

The total cost for downing a fully populated and fully motivated gym is aproximately one hyper potion per attacker. Sometimes one revive as well.

It's more efficient to burn through with your machamp than switching to a saner attacker. Gardevoir, gyarados, of dragonite just didn't matter. Despite your being not very effective they go down prior to using a charge attack anyway.

Have fun gym raiding out there.

Downing a gym defender instantly

I've heard all kinds of strange statements about how to do this, and now I've found the source of the strangeness. It probably works, but it's way more complicated than needed.

If you want to kick out a gym defender without giving the defenders a decent chance to feed it a berry, this is how you do it.

Be at least three players. That much is correct in the linked article. For this example I'll assume exactly three. Skip the crap about 2/9 of full health. The game draws a new combat instance whenever those who drop out of combat reenter as long as the original combat is still running.

And now for the action:


All attackers pick a lineup that will wipe the first and second defender in the gym.

All attackers join combat.

As soon as you verify that you are indeed three attackers in the fight two players give up and drop out of combat.

The remaining attacker inflicts little or no damage to the defender. Dodging is a good way to achieve this.

The two players who dropped out enter combat together, verify that they are indeed both in combat and one drops out.

The remaining one of those two does marginally more damage than the first attacker to remain in combat.

The third attacker enters combat and go all out.

Watch your screens. Make sure all three attackers win at aproximately the same time.

All three attackers enter combat with the next defender and win that fight, or else you'll face the wrath of error 29 and be locked out of the gym for ten minutes.


That's it.


Two players can try this stunt as well. Enter combat and kick the first defender down one notch. The first win won't generate a warning to the player owning the defender,

Leave combat after your win.

Reenter combat, one drops out and joins again. Syncronise the end so that you both win at the same time. Continue into the next defender and kick it down a notch. Rinse and repeat until the gym is cleared.


Is this abusing a bug in the game? I would say so, but, and this is an extremely important but, Niantic support has yet to acknowledge the existence of any bugs in the game. The madness with three percent of the playerbase receiving only two items from pokestops comes to mind.

In a game entirely free from bugs, there are none to abuse. Hence the method above has to be ascribed as a feature.

Changing meta game due to raid boss

With the switch from kyogre to rayquaza as the legendary raid boss a change in the meta game is both clearly visible as well as rather obvious.

I'm talking the gym raiding part of the game rather than the boss raiding one.

Since kyogre made short work of your lineup the problem with a general lack of potions and revives got further aggravated. Unless the lobby got filled you were likely to leave the boss raid with less material for gym raiding than what you had when you arrived.

Rayquaza is a push over and on average you should end up with a surplus of hyper potions and revives.

Indirectly this means you'll have more material with which to start hulking into gyms, which translates into a devaluation of the golden razz berries for gym defence.


In short:

Two weeks ago berry feeding gyms meant running the attacker dry on potions and revives.

Now stubbornly hacking into gyms, especially if you're two or three attackers, means depleting the defender's berry storage.


The change is brutally clear when opposing teams meat before a boss raid, two attacking into the gym and one defending it. The number of casual attackers is visibly increased since they have the potions and revives to afford joining into the fray. This in turn accelerates berry depletion since the defenders go down that much faster.

In the end it means it's harder to defend other gyms since you're running even lower on golden razz berries.

When burning through berries is good

Normally you'd avoid burning through a gym defended by berries, but sometimes you want to keep at it for reasons having very little to do with actually taking the gym down.

We're talking the idiot defence.

While most hardcore players will laugh off ten berries spent, ten berries per gym and day will deplete even the most imbalanced of bags. Say someone with 400 golden razz berries or something like that.

Sure, you have those who spend a significant amount of money and time on the game, but unless you can sustain five bossraids per day, every day, a cost of 40 golden razz berries per day is simply not sustainable.


So, the idiot defence. The definition doesn't apply to defending a gym just prior to a boss raid. At that time just defend everything inside until the boss spawns if you deem those two extra balls important.


With the main exception of chansey basically nothing below 2000 CP should be defended.

As for maxed out, or nearly maxed out pokemon, here's the list:

• Gyarados -- anything electric, but specifically raikou destroys this defender
• Tyranitar and aggron -- machamp does extremely short work of these
• Rhydon and golem -- exeggutor is likely to down just about anything when Solar Beam goes off

And the list of dubious defenders:

• Dragonite -- mauled by articuno
• Scizor -- anything fire, primarily moltres chops this one down

The dubious defenders at least have a chance at inflicting some damage before going down.

The shortlist will cost the defender two golden razz berries for every revive or main potion used. The cost in time for forcing a berry is neglible.

Your main problem as an attacker is that you're likely to run the defender out of feeding slots in less than fifteen minutes at a marginal cost since you get to spin the gym three or four times.

Why persist with attacking, and even prolonging battle if possible? As I said, the cost in potions and revives is neglible, but if you're doing this against a gym defended by multiple players while, for example, having a coffee at a coffee house, you could easily squeeze out thirty berries in a little over half an hour. Those are berries you don't have to care about when it counts later on.

While this won't push the really hard core oppnents out of the game, the semi casuals will have their golden razz berry storage effectively depleted in a few days.