Yeah I had lag issues too, but I always did at times...and I'm sure the gym battling today is really high in terms of volume. I didn't test this fully but I'm thinking beating one pokemon and running can help with lag. Essiantly you have to do them all the same either way, and for me anyway it seems like the lag gets worse the longer it goes on. Berries for feeding can be selected the same way u would for throwing. I didn't see anything for remotely feeding a berry either, although it shows up in your journal when your mon is in trouble. Feeding other peoples mons gets you stardust and gym points. Also according to many others it can sometimes net u a candy of the type of mon you fed.
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First new gym experience, good or bad?
Mine was terrible. The servers were so laggy that I had to keep pounding on mon that should have already fainted. I kept picking my team and then just exiting the gym with the application locked up.
I tried again a bit later with a bit better results. Placing a mon in a gym with an open slot, or spinning the poke stop part of the gym works smoothly. I found a gym defended by a single blissey, and had to beat the blissey about four times, but each time got easier.
After about an hour on my usual circuit, the mon I'd left in the first gym I found was a little hungry; makes me think I should have pretty good hunting early in the morning.
I've only seen an option for feeding rasberries. I'm not sure, if the other berries can be used. I haven't found an option for remote feeding.
I didn't notice any disadvantage to attacking small mon with elite attackers, but I still had to defeat the small mon as many times as the bigger, tougher ones. I don't have enough experience to know anything for sure, but that is my impression.
Blisseys and such didn't seem to be at any disadvantage. It seems beating a mon just takes the same percentage of its maximum cp.
Mons going into a gym are a little hungry when placed. You need to feed them a berry to get them up to full power. You can be nice and feed other people's mons berries. I wonder if I can do that for rival gyms, but haven't tried it.
I couldn't actually dodge. I'd swipe, but it would get interpreted as an attack.
The apps suggested attack team still seems like a dumb line up. It did seem to pick mon about the same level as the opposing mon, I'm not sure what it was trying to suggest by that, but its choices still didn't seem optimal.
It seems like one of my reservations about gym battling has gotten worse not better. I like walking around, and spending 45 minutes to take down a rival gym is not my thing. I could usually work around this by picking off low level gyms, but now even a gym with one defender is a fifteen to twenty minute commitment.
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Good, I thoroughly enjoyed taking down a Valor gym (OK, it had a single eggy, but it whacked my d'nite with SB every time 'cause I wasn't able to dodge... not sure why). It was so much fun I totally forgot to revive my mon and then wondered why they weren't available to put in the gym.
P.S. I didn't have much time for this today, just on my way home from work at 10 p.m. (22:00)... not a time when I feel safe hanging around gyms, LOL. But looking forward to tomorrow ;)
I downloaded an app a while ago that measures internal battery temperature cause I'm on like my 3rd Nexus 5x due to a hardware issue that might be caused by the phone overheating. Probably your phone actually was on fire...mine measures at 115 degrees during some longer gym battles and my finger feels like it was a little bit burned afterward. I think I will need a phone upgrade to really play in the new gym system:(.
Experienced extreme lag here too.
Encounter the following bugs:
-Have to keep on wacking the defender even though it's health is already 0 and should have fainted.
-Charge move execution have to be repeated several times as it seems like it's not captured by the system.
-When switching to another pokemon, the earlier pokemon will constantly get switched back and forth with the current pokemon---That's annoying!
Hopefully all these will get fixed soon!
Here are my first impressions:
-Yep, super buggy/laggy. It's impossible to tell where the energy meter really is because it keeps jumping around due to lag. Dodging is very difficult for every move save maybe Hyper Beam. Several weird freezes that require restarting the app.
-I don't really understand Niantic's math. Generally each successful battle decreases motivation by about 500 CP per defeated mon. So a 1700 CP mon goes from 1700-->1200-->700...but then once the mon goes under 1000 the next defeat ejects it, so the last win sends that 700CP mon to 0. Not complaining, it's just odd.
-So far, I quite like the current system from the attackers' point of view. I especially like how it becomes less and less of a chore to defeat defenders as they lose motivation. The old gym system sucked because you had to wipe out 3000 CP Blisseys over and over again; under the current system that Blissey is only frustratingly strong for the first battle or two.
-The $64,000 (coin?) question is going to be whether this rework renders botting cheaters irrelevant or more powerful than ever. During one of my battles, someone fed the defenders berries and powered them up again. I have yet to really check the numbers of how quickly mons can be fed, but if they can be powered back up to full health faster than defeating them decreases their motivation, the rework is going to be a disaster. As I mentioned in another thread, this creates a huge incentive for cheaters to create dozens of accounts devoted solely to feeding their mons in gyms. Niantic as yet seems weirdly reluctant to just ban these guys, so if the rework favors them they are quickly going to dominate everything all over again.
Even worse than constant feeding of their friendly gyms will be scenarios where they just create enough bot accounts to allow them to be constantly battling real players and depriving them of coins. So far that hasn't quite happened in my area, but I can't imagine it's far off if Niantic refuses to crack down on them.
Oh, and a couple of features I think would be nice to have:
- Since gyms now double as Pokestops that deliver items, it would be nice to really integrate things and allow players to access their bag of Items when they are inside gyms. This would allow you to revive and deliver potions to your Pokemon between battles without having to exit and re-enter the gym.
- Now that prestige is out and motivation is in, it would be cool to have a "continuous battle" feature. Like, if I have a 3000 CP Dragonite attacking a 1400 CP defender, and there are only 1-2 defenders in the gym, it's annoying to knock one defender's motivation down to 900 and then get kicked over to the next defender, then, once the second defender is defeated, I have to battle the gym again to finally boot the first defender out of the gym. Why not just allow me to just continue fighting the first defender until its motivation goes to zero, then do the same to the second defender?
- A small thing, but the fancy new animation before each battle begins is silly and time-wasting. It's also annoying to now have to click on each successive battle to begin; it was better the old way where defenders #2, #3, etc. just appeared immediately without fanfare; you could always just quickly click the icon to exit if you didn't want to fight additional defenders.
1 is actually implemented, there's a little bag icon in the top left as you're picking your team.
2: can't you just exit after the first and re-fight? I think that might be the most efficient strat to take down the gym anyway because you only have to pick 1 mon rather than a full team of counters.
3: yeah, annoying. It's another reason to leave after defeating a single defender--you have to wait through animations for basically the same amount of time as continuing.
Re 2, sure, I could just exit after the first and battle again, but I'd rather not have to do any exiting at all in these cases. Think about it - in scenarios where I am going to crush the defender anyway because of a large CP disparity, it's a little silly to have to fight multiple discrete battles to lower the defender's motivation all the way to zero. It made a bit more sense to have discrete battles in the past when every defeat led to the same exact 1000-point prestige loss, but that's not a factor anymore.
I admit that I'm probably not thinking this through, though - with a "continuous battle" mode it would be possible to lower one defender all the way to zero motivation while leaving the rest with high CP/motivation, instead of weakening them all more evenly.
One other thing that puzzles me:
There are 6 slots in every gym. Existing pokemon can have their motivation increased, at least somewhat, with berries. When motivation goes down to zero the pokemon is ejected. But...what happens in cases where the attacker leaves the gym after ejecting only some of the defenders? Can other trainers show up and drop their Pokemon in those slots?
Because if they can, that seems like a HUGE boon to cheaters. They can just constantly watch for defenders to get ejected, then spoof in and replace the ejected defenders with their own Pokemon, making it much tougher to bring down the gym.
