Speculation - Legendaries on Gym Defense
Let's take a minute to spitball ideas that might give defense-oriented legendaries a chance to shine.
Even among gens 1-3 there's a decent handful of legendaries that at best are used as a last slot filler/anchor and at worst are benchwarmers to never be used seriously due to their stats skewing toward defense over offense. Would allowing them to be placed in gyms give them some use? What methods could be placed to prevent gyms from becoming legendaries only? Are any of them so irredeemably bad that they couldn't cut it even on defense?
Some ideas that could help limit legendary gym takeover:
-Only trainers of a certain level can place them (+35, maybe 40 only?)
-Only one legendary can be placed in a gym at a time
-To place a legendary you have to be the person to actually take out the gym, with preference given to the trainer who dealt the most damage in the final fight?
Odds are none of this would happen but why not have some fun with it?
Answers
Niantic has chosen to restrict themselves to a conversion formula from the original stats and made the game DPS-centric to an unhealthy degree. The combination of the game's simple mechanics and the conversion formulas being bad at what they are supposed to do creates the very narrow meta we live in.
A simple, logical and effective change would be to change hp to have a constant, *like every other pokemon game except Pokemon GO has*. The differences in tankiness aren't supposed to be this big. Besides that, speed could be implemented better and the way defense is calculated needs a revamp for sure.
Prestiging was a mechanic that rewarded using different pokemon than your strongest attackers. Putting it back into the game would serve a double purpose, widen the meta and let everyone complete their ace trainer medals.
It was a lot of fun, even if I got into the gym scene too late to naturally gold my medal before it was too late. Collecting potential prestigers was great and there was really some challenge trying to defeat a 3k cp Gyarados with a 1,5k cp Jolteon while taking as little damage as possible to save healing items.
I think the single biggest issue with the old system was as simple as using cp for gym placement. There are a lot of solid defenders that never saw gyms because of their lower cps. If you took cps away, you could make some really good gyms that forced people to switch out pokemon. They should have just limited gyms to 1 pokemon per species and maybe randomize placement. They certainly fixed the diversity issue...because now people will throw whatever garbage in there...
At least in the main series you could bring bad pokemon to viability by simply leveling them up. I fell in love with Klefki (a steel/fairy) without even using its prankster ability. It gave it something like draining kiss, psychic, flash cannon, and dazzling gleam. It was only weak to fire and ground and resisted tons of stuff. It levels up fast, so it was 20 levels higher than everything else. That dumb thing almost single handedly beat pokemon Moon for me. In Go we call that pokemon a dex filler...
Maybe allow only certain gyms to have legendary defenders, i.e. the EX raid gyms. Or have an event that runs for a short period of time that allows legendary defenders. Or have a tier based system of coin accumulation where lower CP defenders accumulate the coins faster than higher CP defenders and make it so legendary defenders don't give any coins when returned.
Lots of stuff Niantic could do to make the gyms system more diverse if they chose too. I also would like to see a return to prestiging as that added some challenge and thought to the attacking mechanism.
I think placing a legendary inside a gym should be limited to only people who have that gym's gold badge, along with only one legendary per gym. That way it rewards people who actively participate in that gym rather than a passerby who drops in a legendary and also prevents a bunch of legendaries occupying a gym.
Given the Motivation system, I don't see a huge problem with having 6 Legendary's in a gym at once. Bit of a pain when they're at Full Motivation, but when they get down to a minimum motivation they're going to be easy to clear out. Particularly after the Articuno day, when Niantic dropped Articuno down to a Level 4 Raid Boss stats, the idea that Legendary's are too powerful to defend Gyms seems somewhat silly to me - a "Regular" Legendary isn't going to have even 600HP (a Level 1 Raid Boss), for example, so even if you get the full Defense stat, a Legendary is going to be able to be taken down by a Trainer with an optimized counter. And most of us likely have at least 1 optimized counter for each Raid boss by now.
You look at Half Motivation, or No Motivation? There won't be any problems sweeping a gym to get rid of them.
So I'm all for tossing Legendary's in gyms. Give Lugia and Ho-Oh (and now Regice) something to be good at. Heck, this might even make Suicune a worthy pokemon, and let me use my 5+ 90%+ IV Suciunes! (seriously, why did it have to be Suicune that I got the highest IV's for on a regular basis?)
There's already a built-in feature that prevents gyms from being 6 legendaries. It being the fact that Blisseys is better at defending than any of them and Chansey and Snorlax are better than most of them. The strongest gyms with legendaries allowed would start with Blissey-Lugia-Chansey followed by any 3 from Snorlax, Kyogre, Groudon, Raikou, Entei, Latias.
I could only see this happening if one, legendaries took up 2/more slots or only had to be beaten once to knock them out,
but the main reason it wont ever happen, aside from the stats, is candy, you can grind candy from pokemon in gyms, I do it all the time with dragonite, and within 3 days iv gotten 5 candy, they could make it so legendaries wouldn't give candy, but then there'd be no reason to every berry them
This is my own opinion on how this should work:
-Everything you mentioned in the question (LVL35+ etc)
-You need to have a gold badge to place it
-You cannot get candies for it by feeding it
-The legendery should be at a certain level to be placed (mybe above lvl25?)
There's another thing that I thought of and that's letting a player that is playing from a certain time, let's say only players that started playing in 2016 or something? Now why am I saying that, a lot of people can just start the game now and gain a lot of XP and Stardust from events and get easily enough Pokemon to do a Level 5 raid. And people like me who play that game since july 2016 that worked hard on getting XP, Stardust and catching good Pokemon just seemed to be the same people that can join now. So basically what i'm trying to say is that only certain group of people can place Legendery Pokemon in a gym. Mybe it sounds like an EX thing but it can be looked at as a "bonus" thing that only the oldest playing players can get. And I don't see anything wrong with that.
