GamePress

More new info about PvP

The official announcement just arrived on my phone. Some important points:

"Plus, trainers can unlock an additional Charged attack to incorporate into their battle strategies."

This is huge. It now makes sense to carry a main move and a counter move, or a pair of attacking moves. Rayquaza carrying Outrage and Air Attack or Ancient Power would be difficult to handle, for example. Further, we don't know how these moves are selected. How does a trainer "unlock" the second move, what are the limits, etc. If I could teach my Gyarados Drill Run (highly unlikely) it would be a great counter move to oppose the electrics people will fight Gyarados with, etc.

I suspect that fairly soon this will carry over to Gym battles and raids. It won't be that useful for raids, since you know exactly what you're fighting. But it will allow many powerful raider pokemon to do double duty, being a strong option with two different attacks in a raid. For example, A TTar carrying Bite/Stone Edge/Crunch (or Smack Down/Stone Edge/Crunch). And for gym attacking, the attacker could mow through the defenders with whatever move works best. This will add some more strategy to the game, and will be a real boon for pokemon with two types and a good Charged move in each type (like many dragons, for example).

"Earn rewards, including a chance of rare evolution items, for participating in battle."

Looks this is how we'll get our Sinnoh Stones for a while. Hopefully also enough potions and revives to make PvP at least neutral on one's item list, if not a small gain.

"Ultra Friends and Best Friends can challenge each other to trainer battles from anywhere!"

That's awesome. I have friends from far away, and now we can fight whenever we want. I had originally envisioned meet ups where trainers gather to battle each other, much like raids, but lasting longer. However, Ultra friends now don't need to meet up, they can just make, say, Tuesday night league night, and from the comfort of their own homes, fight other trainers in fixed format or freeform tournaments. Whole new avenues of play will be opened up.

It's an exciting time to be playing PoGO. From the looks of it, they seem to be getting this one right. We'll see for sure when it goes live, and hopefully there won't be too many bugs (there will be some - prepare yourselves for that), and not too many bad design choices in the game structure. Hopefully they do something like separate swipe left and right, and make the new combat interface better, not worse.

Asked by aeronaut635 years 4 months ago

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"Ultra Friends and Best Friends can challenge each other to trainer battles from anywhere!"

I almost yelled for joy at this bit. While I get that going out and interacting is part of the game, I have PoGo friends from various different parts of the world, and I love the idea that I can interact with them (beyond just giving gifts).

Also pleased to hear of the return of training in some fashion.

I'm curious how the rewards will work. Will only the winner get rewards? Will the winner get better rewards? Or will both get the same (or at least have the same chance of it)? And presumably there's also going to be a limit on them.

Three rewards per day for PvP with friends (I assume that covers in person as well as Ultra+ friend remote battles), one reward per day for fighting your team leader. Not sure if there's a victory bonus or not.

Now I can gold out that silver Ace Trainer medal I've been carrying since prestiging stopped being a thing. That's nice.

I hope the cost for the second move isn't exorbitant.

IGN reports that:

"After you have a second Charge Move unlocked, when you use a Charge TM in the future, you’ll simply decide which of the two moves you want to replace rather than one automatically being picked. The second Charge Move will be available in all battle scenarios, including Raids and Gyms in addition to Trainer Battles."

Sweet. So if you have a typical 3 charged move pokemon, you open the second move, and if it's not the one you want, a single charged TM gets it automatically (since you won't get two copies of the other move, the one you're keeping).

This will be more interesting for Mewtwo, or pokemon with more than three moves. Looking at you, Mew.

Why would you look at Mew?

Mew can enter the Great Tier while Mewtwo cannot, even at a breakthrough level.

Mew also has a list of both fast and charged moves that's 20 something moves long. Want something extremely specific, to defeat certain weaknesses of the rest of your team, and can't find it elsewhere, Mew can save the day (and the team).

Seems like a neutral choice to me, I feel like people are forcing themselves to use Mew : /

Mewtwo will become a god. Being able to pack Shadow Ball and nearly literally any other of its charge moves will be so good. I can't wait for Shadow Ball/Ice Beam.

For raids, the only gain for this is flexibility. There's one ideal counter for a given raid boss. Now you can have one pokemon carry two ideal counters (sometimes).

For Gyms, being able to mow down more stuff with one gym cleaner is great. And for PvP, counter moves will be useful.

Not so sure Mewtwo will have god status, the synchronicity of its moves is lower. Something like Groudon with Earthquake and Solar Beam (to counter Water) or Earthquake and Fire Blast (to counter Grass) will be more useful. And the pokemon with weird movesets like Ho-Oh may get a boost too. SB/BB or SB/FB could be useful.

Mewtwo can now pack Thunderbolt and Ice Beam simultaneously. Carrying the bolt-beam combo means it can hit literally anything for at least neutral damage and there's a pretty wide array of types that take super-effective damage from at least one of those moves. People who never got a Shadow Ball Mewtwo could look into this.

That's an interesting thought. Maximal coverage to make sure you can hit everything hard. Nice. Still, Mewtwo isn't the optimal user of either of those attacks. Something with stab and one, and something with stab and the other might perform better. We'll see.

From Niantic Japan, through this site's article on PvP

Dodging won't be allowed in PvP. But you will get a Protect Shield, which will block Charged attacks, usable twice per battle (per battle per pokemon, or just per battle?)

Rewards three times daily for PvP, once daily for fighting your team's head trainer (Sparky, Blanche, or Candela).

Second move is unlocked with Candy and Dust. Per pokemon, per pokemon species, or overall. Probably the first - you only want certain ones to fight in each league, as well as unlocking second moves for a few raid pokemon.

Annoyed that I don't have any Shadow Ball Mewtwo under CP 2500. Powered them all up. Then again, probably not optimal, since Banette and Gengar have Ghost fast moves too, and CP cap levels the stat playing field.

How will this affect Mew? The ultimate generalist, go into battle with two radically different charged moves.

Ace Trainer medal can be levelled up again!
The 2nd charge moves can be used in raids and gyms. Would be cool if raid bosses could switch charge moves too, especially T3 solo bosses just for an added challenge.

No dodging is a head scratcher though. I wonder if they are giving up on the dodge mechanic altogether and replacing it with Shields

Sounds like it.

The other issue is that a battle could stall out if both players have their energy ready to fire off a charged move, both know it, and both constantly dodge to avoid the huge hit. This is especially important if they both are low on HP and the last hit would end the battle.

Removing dodging ends the dodge bug, but not in the right way.

"If we ignore the problem it will go away." -Niantic probably

Honestly though I think a limited number of shields works better for a format like this. It would be too easy to stall out a battle by dodging endlessly, though I would still like a dodge bug fix for raids and gyms.

Agree 100%.

"There will also be a training mode you can use freely throughout the day to practice and continue powering up your pokémon with no restrictions."
Glad I didn't power up anything

Very nice. Been wanting a training mode forever

Yep, very nice. Practice rounds to get good at the new style of fighting.

Another nice benefit of this system. When you're about to go Best friends with someone, you can coordinate with them, pop lucky eggs, and have a battle to seal the deal instead of having to juggle times for gift opening. Much cleaner to do.

Sure, coordinating gifts wasn't too hard, but this is much easier, more transparent, and more reliable.

The other question I have is how does the battle mechanic work. Do you have to fight in order, or can you change you matchups. You have a Gyarados up, and your opponent brings up Luxray. Can you swap to your Flygon, or do you have to wait for Gyarados to be KO'd. If so, what's to stop infinite switching?

Maybe swipe left/right now change pokemon? That would be an easy way to switch between three pokemon, have a small icon for each on the side, and wrap it around (so three left swipes would get you back where you started).

You can swap Pokemon. According to one of the article I read there will be a 50 sec cooldown between switches. So if your opponent start with Lugia, you switch to ttar then he counters and switch to Machamp, you're screwed because he now have 50 sec of free Punch on your ttar.

50 seconds? Your Ttar would be toasted. I hope it was a translation issue and it's actually 15 seconds. That would be more manageable. Some battles won't last 50 seconds.

50 sec does sound excessive, but it can't be too low or the battle will turn to a switch fest.

The most important info for me is when it will be available, i want to test it.
And glad there will be a remote PvP, its been raining most of the time in my city, so not really keen on raid with the weather especially raiding Creselia in rain..

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