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I don't see an upside to powering up anything lately.

Not because everything I have is really good or anything. If I gain a new Pokemon with decent IVs, ,moveset and CP with room to power up, I still leave it as is.

Anybody agree?

A lot of you will know more than I do about how the game works but I feel like the Pokemon I was keeping maxed with each trainer level won't benefit much from further power ups.
1000-1500 CP trash Pokemon can take down a gym, it'll just take a little longer and cost some extra revives/potions (unless you use one-use attackers and xfer them after).

Potions, Revives are easy to get for most people no?
And what's the difference taking a few extra minutes to take down a gym using crappy Pokemon?

So what's the upside to powering stuff up if anything pretty much works?

If there are good arguments against my opinion(s), I'd be happy to be educated.

PS: With this new philosophy (cutting back on powering up by 99%), I've gone from a broke dust trainer to nearly 250K dust in a short time (event included).
PPS: If I had a good Lapras or Dragonite I'd probably power them up but those are exceptions.

Thanks for reading and for insightful replies.

Asked by TTPB8 years 5 months ago

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It is just time. I love to take a gym fast, expecially now, in winter, just because my hands get cold during long battles.

Before Gym-Reward-Update, there was another point:
Taking down a level-10-gym with 6 PKM was quite a challenge. So it was fine to have strong attackers.
Now, it is not as urgent as it used to be, for two reasons: The reward to clear gym completely was taken down, and there are much less level-10-gyms.

So your point of view seams quite reasonable to me.

I still power up, to PKM-level 30, what seems to be a good price-performance-ratio.

I still power up attackers ASAP, just to save time when taking down a gym because it's frikking cold and time is the major factor. Also, what else is the dust good for

What does powering up even do though?
+CP
+HP

Anything else?

Higher Attack, the defenders faint faster which saves a lot of time.

+attack, +defense, and +HP
(CP is a number derived from those stats, so raising them will raise CP.)

You can check https://pokeassistant.com/main/ivcalculator?locale=en to see how much raising levels will affect your stats.

Dust can be stored for further updates:
- maybe another big change in strength of some PKM
- maybe change to gym-play
- maybe gen2-pkm
- maybe as a currency, when trading will be activated

But dust is the easiest thing to get, here in town I always find Pidgeys and stuff to grind dust if necessary, while I find only a limited number of rare Pokemon for candy and get only 100 coins a day

Dust is easy to get, but you need really much of it. I get somthing like 10-30k per day, depending on time invested.

To raise a pkm from level 20 to 30, something like 80k of stardust are needed. I still have some poliwrath's and slowbros with 80%+ rating and perfect defending moveset, who wait to be powered up.

I would be happy to have 100-200k in reserve, but i often spend it too unthoughtful.

I get even less dust recently, just walk from gym to gym to get my coins, with my hands in the pockets to keep them from freezing off. Playing PG sucks in winter :(

I have three gloves for that. Two for the left hand to hold the phone and one for the right hand.

I have had a few decent defenders for a while.

Just to list a few:

2167 Exeg 89% Conf/Psy
2134 Slow 98% Conf/Psy
1860 Poli 91% Bub/Ice
1545 Wig 98% Pou/PRough

I was working on powering them up pre-CP udpate.
But after the CP update I stopped powering up Poli and Wigs. However I kept powering up Exec because it still has lots of room to power and was still 2100+ after nerf and the SlowBro was only 1600 with lots of power up room.

Reading that you're holding off on powering up similar Pokemon has me wondering if I should have or not. I suppose I'm keeping the faith that those defensive Pokemon might return to glory one day. Plus, it's not like they're useless now right?

It's still good to have some decent defenders to keep the casuals away, but a determined player doesn't give a f* whether your Snorlax is CP 2,600 or CP 2,700 so currently I power up only the attackers

I'd rather take out a gym quickly and give my defenders a better chance of surviving longer than hoard something that has no other use. Dust's sole use is in powering up Pokémon, whether that be gen 1 or at some unknown point in the future gen 2. I can understand not powering up poor movesets, and can understand saving a bit for unknown acquisitions. I don't see the point in having a hoard of dust if it means standing in the freezing rain for an extra 10 minutes to take down a gym. I frequently just knock local gyms down by a level as I'm walking past - harder to do with weak attackers, much easier to do with weak defenders.

Yup.

Even with the increased prestige removal when attacking an enemy gym, between a level 3 gym filled with junk 1000 CP pokemon and a level 5 gym filled with good 2000+ CP pokemon, players that are just looking to quickly get as many gyms and cash out will go after the junk gym and leave the good gym alone.

High level gyms come down easier, but still take a while, and take a lot longer than the nearby junk gyms. I think most of the players that fight higher level gyms are doing it for the challenge not just for the coins, and a lot of players are probably moving past higher level gyms.

I know at least for me, I would rather build up an allied gym with good pokemon in it or take down a enemy gym with junk pokemon in it than fight a large enemy gym with good pokemon in it.

As for gen2, other than the evolutions from gen1 pokemon that I already have ready, it is probably going to be a while before I get anything new that is really good and enough candy to evolve it too.

I like high level gyms the most. They drop much more ep and are easy and fast to take down.
Building up friendly gyms is a good thing. I usually build them up to 10. So other players can join without training.

2 reasons : Time and Glory

Wrong priorities. Maxing out pokemon is irrelevant, as attacking a gym is easy and defending it is nigh-impossible. And it is simple - just grind dust and candies and throw them at the high-CP-types. In short: Powering up is for noobs.

The challenge is in prestigeing. Getting a full rooster of trainers with ideal matchup against the common defenders is hard. They need not only the best movesets and types, but also just the right combination of ATK, DEF, and STA to finish the fight before their own XP runs out. And you'll need multiple sets, with CP 1000, 1200, 1400 each. Done right, it is possible to get close to 1000 prestige out of a Snorlax using just a single Hypno.

Also, what use is a gym that nobody is leveling up? Early defenders should have similar CP, so a good trainer has to have a rooster of good defenders starting from CP 2000 up. And these early defenders should make prestiging as easy as possible, while at the same time making it hard to take down the gym. This means, good matchups against high-level but low-CP types, but not special vulnerability to high-CP attacker types. Very hard to figure out, but doable.

"Powering up is for noobs"

Tell that to the kids that run and /hide from my 3k+ defenders.

I generally only have to go and refill one defender out of 15 in a week now.

5k a day dust before I even flip a stop is great.

"Takes a noob to know a noob."

Yeah, yeah. I had a gym park like that for about two months. Patted myself on the shoulder about well bulid & well defended quality gyms. As it turned out it was just that nobody in that part of town did care enough to take them down. Than a single guy stepped up, and within two weeks it was a ruined landscape of level 3 gyms you had to take back every day.

I agree. No sense powering up as it's so easy to take down gyms so doesn't matter who's defending or attacking. Plus I had a good deal of maxed out mons that are worthless after the updates. I'll wait for gen 2

A bit of a dramatic statement with dramatic black and white answers.

I have 3 crews - a crew of attackers (~10 -15 mons), whom I power up to Level 30 (to crush gyms). A crew of defenders (~15 mons), whom I power up as high as I can (so that I can be in the back of the gym). And then I have a crew to Prestige and I keep these at various CP levels between 900 and 2000.

I personally enjoy building up teams and powering them up to their max potential, regardless of the difference it makes for them staying in gyms longer.

Powering up has always had diminishing returns...Always been that way, but if you value time/potions/revives, like others have said, what else will you use the dust for? You can tear down a level 10 gym with lvl 10 mons, but it'd take a lot longer and is generally more frustrating.

I personally have over 550k dust already and like you, don't power up many things (or any attackers currently) since I don't have a need, but I'm sure once I get decent IV mons, I'd power up those too since that's just "part of the game" and you might as well since saving it is useless...Time is valuable after all.

As listed below, your Lvl 11 mon is already 50% maxed out...if you catch random stuff, everything is pretty usable.

I suppose it's also for the end game...Assuming they raise the lvl cap, I, (and many other people) are planning to power up their mons well past 30 (too much dust anyways at high levels and not enough mons to power up (for me at least)) and I think they will eventually change the way gym defenders are ranked (I'm hoping for mon level perhaps?).

From here:
https://pokeassistant.com/stardust?locale=en

Here are some key observations:
By level 11, your Pokemon is already 50% as powerful as it will ever be, despite only having paid 4.5% of the total Stardust cost.

By level 30, your Pokemon is already 90% as powerful as it will ever be, despite only having paid 43% of the total Stardust cost.

Leveling a Pokemon from 30 to max level costs 165,000 Dust and only gives a 8.4% gain in power. For this same price you could raise 2 Pokemon from 20 to 30 and each will see a +22% power gain.

A level 30 Pokemon with max IV's can be more powerful than a level 40 Pokemon with low IV's.

By level 11, your Pokemon is already 50% as powerful as it will ever be, despite only having paid 4.5% of the total Stardust cost.

Power is not everything that counts. It is perfectly reasonable to look at CPs, CPs represent power and defense.
If a PKM lives longer, it can deal more damage until it faints, this fact is ignored by only looking at its power.

Returns are still diminishing, but imo only beyond level 30.

Actual combat power is CP^3. A higher level mon deals more damage so the fights are shorter and it receives less blows, it takes less damage from each blow because it has a higher defense, and it can stand more damage because it has more HP.