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Best gym defenders after rebalance?

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Curious how the rebalance affected the gym defender meta. Anyone have any insight?

Asked by moots6 years 4 months ago

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It remains Golden Raspberries.

And the winner for Most Boring Answer is....

Boring and correct.

So you're convinced it is just as effective to GRB a Blissey as it is to feed a Pidgeot?

Might be a boring answer.... but it’s the truth

How is it the truth? It is not even an answer, feeding GRBs is a mechanic to aid defenders, not a defender itself. If prestiging was still a thing he might as well just have replied "prestiging" like a knob.
Let me put it in terms any barbarian can understand the real meaning of the question.
Let's say you are trying to defend a gym against 4 uncoordinated attackers, you have 1 GRB left (for whatever reason), 60 seconds left on the clock before a raid starts, and there are only two 1/3 motivated Pokemon left in it. Which one will you use your goldie on? Which one will be able to squeeze in enough seconds to make the use of a GRB worth spending it? That's what we want to discuss not these cynic non-answers. If you would be as willing to waste a GRB on a Scizzor as much as you'd be to do so on a Snorlax then I pity you. Clearly it is not the same thing. The choice of defender clearly matters of you want to make your GRBs as effective as possible. Remember everything in this game's meta revolves around time and resource efficiency? Have you been reading this Q&A at all?

There is no good defender

But grb?

That's not the question. There might not be any "good" defenders according to your standards but some defenders are better than the rest. What do you put in a gym when you want to keep it your color? Do you waste your GRBs as willy-nilly on a Magby as you would on a Blissey? Of course not, you are not stupid.

Seriously dude what don’t you understand? It makes ZERO difference what you put in a gym every single Pokémon is easy defeated....

It does matter why can’t you understand that? Magby or blissey are equally easy to defeated .... Seriously do you struggle defeating a maxed Blisssey? Or a Snorlax or a Dragonite? Because I don’t and I straight up no bullshit don’t know a single player that does

Still bissey, chancey got knocked out of gyms, likely perminately, vaporeon's dead as a defender now; milotic, dragonite, clefable, metagross, got buffed, so we might see more than just fully loaded normal tanks now which while wont be a challenge to take, but it will be nice to see variety in gyms

Vaporeon is far from bad even with the slight nerf, it's the 11th tankiest non-legendary, but 8 of the top 10 are weak to Machamp.

Clefable is still just a poor man's Gardevoir. It ranks fairly low as far as Machamp walls go, and while walling dragons is also good, it's just so much worse than Togekiss and Gardy.

It's definitely nice that this might incentivize variety, although I haven't seen people adapt yet as there are still lots of Chanseys in gyms despite them dying so much faster than they used to.

“despite them dying so much faster than they used to.”
Compared to Chanseys in the past, yes.
Compared to other gym defenders now, Chansey is still the 2nd best time waster.

And in my area, they adapt really fast. I’ve seen way more Gardevoirs and Clefables in the past 2 days.

It also dies much faster compared to other available defenders now. Chansey used to be much slower than the slowest neutral matchup for Machamp, now it's slightly faster. I think you will waste more time by stacking a gym so that the attacker can't steamroll several defenders with the same pokemon (post-rebalance Machamp should be able to take both Blissey and Chansey with dodging, or at least very close). Which means they will either spend time picking attackers or fighting unoptimal matchups.

Gardevoir was always a staple here so it really hasn't been possible for there to be way more of them. Clefable I don't think should be seeing a huge surge, Milotic, Metagross and Dragonite on the other hand should.

I hope gym defenders tier list gets updated soon, a lot of people may not know what defenders should use or which ones to power up

Is that a bad thing? :D

Best defenders are still Blissey and Chansey. They've fallen but are still standing above everyone else.

I'm not convinced on Chansey. Stacking gyms so that the attacker gets stretched on their ability to bring a SE attacker to every matchup seems better now.

Blissey - Togekiss/Gardevoir - Chansey - some others is still the preferable build. Right? Or maybe you put someone who can resist MM Metagroos in between.

I don't think it is anymore. You can now defeat any Blissey and any Chansey with a single Machamp, I'd rather put in something that strains the attacker's team choices instead of giving them a free 2-for-1. Blissey-Togekiss-Metagross seems like a pretty good start for example.

More now so than ever, call the answer *boring* if you want, is golden raspberries. With the boost to machamp and the nerf to blissey, nothing even takes much more than a few seconds to defeat.

...which means that good gym defenders are slow decaying ones, forcing the attacker to do three runs through the gym.

That much as well be the case, but that's precisely what we want to discuss

The top tiers before rebalance (Blissey, Chansey) still hold the top positions, however, as several users noted those are the 4th & 5th respectively after:
- Error (29)
- A Raid Boss has taken control of the gym!
- GRB