Defending gyms is tottally nerfed.

I think that 100 coins per 21 hours and 5000 stardust is already a good enough reward for gym battles. On top of that you also gain some XP taking down enemy gyms. Attacking gyms is supposed to be easier than defending them, because then most gyms would just get taken by highest level players in town and other people wouldn't have any chance to take them down. Still however I do agree that attacking gyms should be a little bit harder than it currently is.

I am totally disagree with you. In my city you cannot take 10 gyms because when you take the 3rd one then somebody will take one gym of yours (unless you wake up at 5.00am). Many times when I take a gym it is knocked down in less than 5 minutes (I do it at 18:00-20:00).

So, I only take 2 gyms which are closed. Also, I've 2 good defenders that are placed in two gyms during about 15 days. These gyms are placed in an instinct area and they are always between 40.000-52.000 level points. Also my defenders are on the 2nd place (with about 2.600-2.700cp). So, every day I've 20 coins without attacking any gym (without spending time and potions).

In the last month I managed to keep an awesome average in gym revenues, almost near pefection (5700 stardust and 114 coins per day), with the following strategy.

I live in a small town but relatively close to a big city. My team is not the strongest one both in my area and in the big city as well (Milan). So I stopped focusing on taking down gyms and I started selecting which gym is worth powering up. Those are the criteria I use to evaluate the friendly gym:

is it resisting more than one day?
have it good CP and tier 1-1.5 defenders?
is it at least lev5?
can i get into at least in the middle of the defenders stack?
is it populated by high level players?
are there other weaker gyms around?
is it a relatively low-traffic area?

All those questions can be summarized as: is this gym a deterrent for most attackers?

So I started to cherry-picking the gyms that deserved to be trained, I practiced in gym training in order to save consumables and taking advantage of type effectiveness and CP difference. At the beginning I managed to keep for some days 4-5 gyms then rushed the taking down of the remaning enemy gyms to have the full reward.

As for now I'm in 11 gyms, I can collect rewards after exactly 21 hours without going out and I train on average 1 gym per day to counterbalance the losses.

For this reason I focus on powering up defender pokemons, and I only use specialized-low CP attackers/trainers. I also have to move a lot around (only 1 gym every 15 is attractive on average in my area), I need to track down which pokemon is in wich gym and how long on average it resists.

Hope this notes can help. I know in some areas there can be less gyms or more competition, but this is my experience, the only one I can talk about :) Good luck and train 'em all!

Gym battling is a freakin joke right now, especially in urban areas.

I have 5 Dragonites over 2.5k (including 2 at 3k+), a 2.4k Snorlax, 2.5k Lapras, 2.3k Slowbro, 4x Exeggutors between 2.4k-2.6k - you name it.

I'm lucky if a single one of my defenders lasts overnight, let alone multiple days. We've held a gym at level 10 in the area with all Pokemon 2.5k+ and ONLY Snorlax/Lapras/Dragonite, and it's gone in 2 days max

I've collected 6 one time but it was a fluke b/c I was awake at 4am and roaming the gyms with no work on a weeknight.

Besides that one time, I average 2-3 defenders a day and that's after putting 45-60 min of work in to level up gyms.

It's a joke. I'd rather spend that 60 min on the couch watching Netflix and spend the $0.15 those coins would have cost me.

I will say this though - for rural players where gym battling is NOT pointless, I would max up defenders. Why? B/c attacking a gym is a complete and utter joke. You don't need stronger Pokemon to win.