Should I evolve another Dragonite or power my current ones.
I currently have 3 Dragonites with dragon tail/Outrage that are around 3200ish in CP and I have 141 Dratini candies atm. I don't have any other dragons powered up currently so I am wondering if I should evolve a fourth Dragonite or power up my current ones even more. I have a 807 CP 87% IV Dratini that will probably be 3000-3100 CP if evolved.
Answers
I tried a solo attempt while waiting (trying to convince) another raider to help battle a wind boosted Fire Blast Palkia...by myself and without a friendship boost I got into the yellow. He finally decided we couldn't lose. For the real raid I had another phone and we did the easy/usual trio. I find if you are the one reporting the raid and trying to get people there it can help to be overly prepared. He caught a 2830cp which is pretty good. Here are my two dragon parties.
For cost effective raiding, power things up to level 30 until you have a team of 6. Above that the return (CP gain per candy or dust) is about half that of below level 30.
But it also makes sense to have one powered up one, to hit gyms, maybe PvP, and as a powerful lead-off in raid groups (lead pokemon usually gets a little longer before the charged move is fully charged up).
YMMV.
On the other side of the coin, after Palkia, there isn't much coming that Dragons are really good against, so you might want to save dust until there's a use for it in the present.
> Above that the return (CP gain per candy or dust) is about half that of below level 30.
It is worse than that. Above level 30, the CP gain per *power up* is halved. But the stardust and candy cost for each of those reduced power ups goes through the roof.
After you have hoarded enough resources, it will eventually be worth maxing the strongest pokemon that you use most often for those marginal performance gains.
In the meantime though, as others have said, having more attackers at or above level 30, checking for breakpoints against raid bosses, will probably be more useful.
My personal strategy is to first power up a team of six for whatever type. In this case dragon. My dragon team is four rayquaza and two dragonites. Once I get the whole squad of dragons up to level 30, then when the current raid boss requires dragon, I look at further powering up members of the squad.
For example, when palkia came out, I gave my maxed out rayquaza a second charge move (areal ace), TM'd a level 35 rayquaza from areal ace to outrage, and powered one level 30 rayquaza to level 35. On this squad, my level 40 dragonite and level 35 dragonite, seemed ok where they were. So, I didn't power the level 35 further. The sixth member of the squad is a level 30 rayquaza.
When faced with a dracometeor palkia, my squad lasts about 100 seconds. For the other move sets they last roughly twice as long. When I re-lobby, I max revive my dragon squad, if things are tight, or just accept the default selection, if things are under control.
If I wanted to further optimize, I'd probably try to get a couple more canned squads of level 30 dragons, because whatever level of dragon gets OHKO'd by dracometeor. For fireblast and hydropump the maxed out dragons hold out noticeably longer. However, I don't want to invest in an 18 deep squad of dragons. So, I max revive when I need to, and the next time dragon is the flavor of the day, I will probably bump the level 30 rayquaza to level 35.
Given that I'm only using two dragonites and filling out the rest of the squad with rayquaza, I don't need to evolve or power up a third dragonite, but your situation may differ.
What do you want them for? Having more iterations of the same mon at L30-ish is generally more effective (grants you the highest performance gains), and having less iterations but maxed out grants you the ability to achieve certain challenges.
For example, if you are a casual player you and your raid group would benefit from more iterations of Dragonite against Palkia to reduce significantly the group size to 4-5 trainers. However, having them maxed out grants you the ability to trio it easily with equally powered trainers. The last part is important: the overall gain is much lower if not all of you do the same effort to max them out.
