Thread: Pokémon GO
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Brad
Selfish Heathen
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Zone of Pain
 
2016-07-17, 15:57

I haven't found any good, thorough, and consistently correct guides, but here's what I've been able to piece together from a few sources and experience:
  • When you fight in a gym, you always fight the defending members in ascending CP order, making the first one easier and the last one harder.
  • Pokémon GO seems to follow the same effective/ineffective pairings as in the classic games. See: http://pokemondb.net/type. Use that to choose the best types of pokémon to fight the defending team at a gym.
  • When challenging a rival gym, you can take six pokémon with you. The game automatically picks six for you, but you can change them out by tapping on them before starting the first battle.
  • To attack, tap the screen. It seems a lot of players just tap like mad to try to get in attacks as quickly as possible while also taking damage themselves.
  • To dodge, swipe left or right. When do you dodge? A fraction of a second after the screen flashes yellow. A yellow flash indicates an incoming attack. Unfortunately, in my experience on cellular (both 4G and LTE), there's too much lag, and dodging rarely actually works. If you are lucky enough to have access to and use proper wifi at a gym, though, dodging seems to work much better. If you can manage to dodge, you can get into a good rhythm of dodge-attack-dodge-attack all the way through to the end. The timing is pretty regular on the opponent's attacks, too. Because latency/lags/server hangups suck so much, it seems like nobody actually tries strategically dodging.
  • If you defeat any members of a rival's gym, you reduce the gym's prestige. You don't have to defeat them all to reduce prestige as long as you defeat at least one. So, if you have lots of potions and revives, keep losing, resuscitating your best pokeymans, attacking again, and knocking down the prestige a little bit at a time. Eventually the gym will reduce in levels and kick out the lowest-cp defenders one at a time, making the next battle easier.
  • If there is another player on your team nearby, you can team up to take over a rival gym at the same time. All you do is both start the battle around the same time, and you will each see the other across the screen helping with the fight. This can be hugely beneficial.
  • Once you (or your team) have control of a gym, you can fight your own pokémon there to increase your team's prestige at that gym. You can only use one pokémon, though. When your gym has enough prestige, it levels up, and your team can add more pokémon to defend it.
  • Once you have assigned a pokémon to a gym, it stays there (you cannot use it) until the gym level is reduced enough to knock it back out. When that happens, it immediately returns to your inventory.
  • As soon as you put a pokémon in a gym, go to the store screen and tap the shield icon in the upper right. That's how you get rewards for controlling a gym. You can only collect the rewards once every 21 hours, though.
  • You don't actually have to be in control of the gym for 21 hours to collect again. If you get kicked out, all you have to do is take it back over and be in control when/after the timer expires, and you can immediately collect again.

Reward for controlling a gym. Note the clock reset and counting down from 21 hrs at the top:

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