Stay Home, GO Battle: Entering the Pokémon Go Competitive Scene
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Introduction
July 2016 was a pretty wild one for everyone with a modern mobile device: Pokémon GO launched, and that summer just hit differently for a lot of people owing to the sense of camaraderie and passion everyone had running around catching them all. Right out of the gate, Pokémon Go was a smash hit, but it was missing some very key features we all knew and loved from the MSG (main series games): trading and battling were the two that immediate came to mind. While I won't be touching too much on trading, I'll be focusing on the latter, which carries the million-dollar question: what is the Pokémon Go competitive scene all about and how do you even get started with it?
Before I get into it, I'd like to give a major shoutout to resources such as the Silph League, GamePress, and the entire Silph Road subreddit as a whole; lurking in all of these for a long time turned me into a massive information sponge just waiting to get filtered and squeezed. TSR is, for a crude analogy, what Smogon is to the MSG; hosting themed tournaments over varying ranked seasons, as well as providing a large userbase and database for general and competitive knowledge. GamePress is where I personally go if I'm looking for some quick numbers and overviews in a Dex and web-friendly layout, akin to Smogon's Strategy Dex. I highly endorse both; definitely check them out for sure if you're wanting to go a little deeper after this.
"But it's just tapping nonstop, then once your charge move is full, you use it, right? That's all it is???"
This oversimplification is a common one that isn't too far off, but there's quite a bit more under the hood to the battling system than may seem evident from the get-go. There's been a few tweaks to it since its introduction in Q4 2018, but it fundamentally remains the same, just a few minor UI adjustments and general QoL changes. We're also about 4 years out from the game's launch as a whole, and with the fundamental concept of this game to get out and go being turned into stay in and no, there's never been a better time to look at this semi-new feature as a metagame and how you can get your feet wet.
(I wrote this article at the beginning of the lockdown back in March, so as a forethought, if there is anything slightly out of date I missed I sincerely apologize!)
if the lockdown was so good why isn't there a lockdown 2
Rulesets/Info
The MSG ranked format is bring 6, pick 3 (which I think is a just fine format). Go Battle League (GBL) operates on a blind pick 3 format, which already right off the bat carries its own advantages and disadvantages; anyone that played DPP going into BW knows exactly how these shoes fit, and having a good lead can dictate a win or a loss before the match even starts (I'll explain why in the Basic Mechanic section).
Games last 4 minutes and 30 seconds (bit arbitrary), with a tiebreaking mechanic like Game Freak's: the player with the most Pokémon left standing at the time out wins. If a charge attack is happening when the timer runs out, it will resolve the charge attack animation and damage and immediately declare the winner before any additional input can be registered.
There are three Leagues (read: rulesets) for trainers to participate in; Great League, Ultra League, and Master League. Great League is for Pokémon that are 1500CP and under, Ultra League is for Pokémon that are 2500 CP and under, and Master League is a no-limit format where anything is allowed. When you challenge someone on your friend list or pick a PvE opponent, you have the option to choose a league and edit a team or pick a pre-registered one; in ranked, the League is predetermined and you will enter the one that is currently in rotation, which is advertised in the news tab.
Niantic has also recently announced a 4th battling format for season 2 called the Premier Cup, a Master League variant that bans the use of legendaries and mythicals; this shakes things up significantly, as outside of Rhyperior, Conkeldurr, Machamp, Togekiss, Garchomp, and a few select others, the vast majority of the Masters tier lists all contain legendaries. This format is sure to be a welcome breath of fresh air to most and promptly shows my maxed-out Dialga the door.
There are occasionally themed Cups that happen in addition to Premier Cup; at the time of writing this article the five that have been introduced are Flying Cup (all Pokémon must be part Flying-type), Halloween Cup (Dark-, Fairy-, Bug-, Poison-, and Ghost-types only), Little Cup (500CP or less, the Pokémon has to be able to evolve and not have evolved once), Kanto Cup (1-151 only, regional variants allowed), and Catch Cup (only things caught during the same season are allowed). It seems they are taking notes from Silph, which for the time being seems like a good thing!
There are no restrictions to the number of times you can fight someone on your friend list, but you will only get rewards for the first three times in one day you play someone, and fighting a team leader (PvE) will get you a reward for the first fight of the day. In order to fight someone remotely, you need to be Ultra/Best friends with that user (30+days of friendship activity); however, this restriction has been temporarily removed to encourage safe social distancing.
In typical Niantic format, you do need to walk a short amount of Kms (at launch it was 5, the default has been lowered to 3) before you are able to play in the league, or you can pay with PokeCoins to immediately unlock a set of 5 battles on the ladder (this mechanic has also been temporarily removed). A grouping of 5 battles in a row is commonly referred to as a set, and there is a daily cap of 5 sets per day for a total of 25 battles. In my experience, completing all 5 sets will take anywhere between 60-90 minutes but rewards you with varying amounts of stardust regardless of your W/L ratio, so you can continue to improve your rosters with rewards such as Rare Candies, TMs, and Stardust. The daily number of sets has been known to change following maintenance or to commemorate special events, so be sure to check the in-game news tab and @NianticHelp on Twitter for updates on when/how the limit gets tweaked.
There are two reward structures based on your total number of wins in a set: a basic run and a premier run.
By using a Battle Pass (formerly known as a Raid Pass) you gain access to different and better rewards; you'll run into Pokémon such as starters at lower ranks, but as you climb you will run into rarer Pokémon such as Lapras, Deino, and Shieldon. At the time of writing this article Rufflet and Scraggy are semi-exclusive to ladder play, so you'll more than likely need to rank up for some of those Dex entries. The choice is yours if you'd like to use a battle pass at the beginning of your set to alter your route to go for better prizes.
As a bit of an afterthought that doesn't slide in anywhere easily, Niantic does have a leaderboard available at https://pokemongolive.com/leaderboard/, which shows the top 500 players worldwide on any given day. Shoot for the top!
Basic Mechanics
Yes, before we get into it too much, battling is simply tapping to attack. On your screen, you will see your charge attack(s), and as you use your fast attacks, your charge meter will fill to use that attack. It is possible to overcharge this meter, which is reflected by the varying degrees of opacity and rings surrounding the type icon of the attack, making it possible to save energy for a different encounter. Once the meter is full at the first stage or higher, if you tap it you will enter a minigame where you swipe type icons to deal increased damage with your move (though note this minigame doesn't exist in Gym or Raid battle scenarios). If you are on the receiving end of a charge move, you will be prompted to choose if you'd like to use a Protect Shield or not, and you have a few seconds to make the decision while they complete the minigame. Deciding when to shield and knowing your enemy's possible movesets is incredibly key here and adds some mind games to the heavily streamlined format.
One large mechanic in Go PVP that differs from the MSG that I mentioned earlier is the Protect Shield, two one-time-use buttons that reduce the damage to 1. There's a lot of interconnecting ideas that are coming later in this article that involve shields, so I'd like to come back to this later in an entirely different piece to expand more on shield timing, shield baiting, and the mind meta that surrounds when to hit that button.
Switching Pokémon is a very viable strategy in the MSG and can be used in rapid succession if need be until you reach an advantageous game state, but GBL switching being in real time has a drastic spin on it: once you switch once, you won't be able to do so for a short period afterwards. The ability to do it any time, however, creates instances where knowing the exact moment to swap or not can decide the outcome of a game immediately. Earlier I had referred to winning or losing from the very start; if your opponent switches first, you have the switch advantage, which can be exploited that for the duration of the switch cooldown to really pad the gamestate more in your favor.
Damage multipliers are a little different in this game entry: while STAB does exist in Go in both PvE/PvP environments, the Pokémon's moves receive only a 20% bonus. If a move is super effective, it receives a 1.6x damage modifier and multiplies again if the mon is 4x weak, for a whopping 2.56x modifier — chunking out Dragonites with Ice Shard is some incredibly satisfying HP dropping. On the other hand, a move that is resisted will receive a 0.625x damage multiplier, which also stacks to an abysmal ~0.39x multiplier in the event of a x4 resistance; Dragonite just doesn't care about Grass-types at all. Type immunities don't exist but do have math attached to them: the game hands out a double resistance modifier of .039x based on the type that would be nullified by MSG logic. This can stack to form a x6 resistance; a Jumpluff taking an Earth Power would reduce the damage with the combination of an immunity and a type resistance (0.39 x 0.625) and laugh at the 0.24x Ground-type damage it doesn't have to shield for at all.
Let's take a moment and talk about Shadow and Purified Pokémon (yes, they exist, XD/Colosseum lovers!), which can be obtained from Team Rocket Grunts and Leaders. Shadow Pokémon deal ~20% extra damage, which stacks with STAB, but they also have ~20% less Defense. In the right settings, this can enable you to absolutely shred through an advantageous matchup; Shadow Victreebel and Shadow Gardevoir immediately come to mind in Great League as two Pokémon with incredibly potent fast moves in Razor Leaf and Charm, respectively, which only get boosted even more. It's also been datamined that Purified Pokémon will in the future (or not, who knows) deal extra damage to Shadow Pokémon, but the damage boost is neither set at a specific value nor live at the moment.
Stat boosts and drops do exist in Go, but only in PvP settings. They're probably considered uncommon in the grand scheme of most movepools, but some prominent examples are Ancient Power and Ominous Wind (10% chance to gain +2 Attack/Defense), Power-Up Punch (low damage/energy, raises the user's Attack by 1 stage 100% of the time), Icy Wind (100% chance to drop the foe's Attack), and Superpower (relatively fast-charging Fighting-type attack that drops the user's Attack and Defense by 1 stage). Using a stat-altering move on a shield does not nullify the buff/debuff, which makes firing off moves like Icy Wind and Power-up Punch much more tantalizing, and it makes using Superpower and Draco Meteor a serious consideration. Just like in the MSG, switching will eliminate your debuffs and buffs; the limited access to switching will make the decision to fire off that debuffing nuke or saving that Icy Wind for your opponent's NEXT switch-in a lot more significant.
On top of having varying animation speeds and damage outputs, all fast moves will generate energy differently and will dictate how quickly you get access to your charge moves. You do not gain energy from taking damage in PvP, so your energy count is strictly tied to your fast move's potency. Some fast moves will do more damage but build up less charge (two examples that come to mind are Charm and Razor Leaf), and others will do significantly less damage but build up charge incredibly fast (such as Mud Shot and Psycho Cut). Knowing the movepool on your Pokémon and how it complements the rest of your team is only one piece of the puzzle when it comes to prepping, and the correct fast/charge moves, despite seeming incredibly linear, can tweak how the Pokémon performs significantly. Charge energy can be stocked up beyond the visible cap up to 100, so if you're able to finish off an enemy without using a charge move, go for it! This will in most cases put you in an extremely advantageous state in the next matchup, which will force a shield to be used or cause your enemy to take heavy damage before your Pokémon faints, which ALSO carries the bonus of you having switch advantage; in a 3v3 format, this can be game-deciding.
Somewhat uncommon but not unheard of is Niantic altering these values at any time for game balance; they can and do add or remove moves to Pokémon's movepools and change damage values and energy requirements based on the competitive game states, which conceptually is something I kind of wish Game Freak would take note of here. These shakeups are always available to read in the News tab when they happen, so stay informed on the next up and coming threats!
tl;dr Real-time weather isn't relevant in PvP battling, but it should be noted when you're wanting to team build from scratch.
Preparation
One feature absent at launch was the appraisal feature, a visual bar graph of your Pokémon's IVs and a rare and prominent example of something Niantic does noticeably better than Game Freak!
Appraising a Pokémon will outline its IVs (Attack, Defense, and HP) on a 0-15 bar graph and rate it on a visual scale from 0 to 3 stars with a red ribbon (in the game's code and search features this is officially known as 4* despite no 4th star showing). From a Gym/Raid/general PvE standpoint these don't matter too much, as ~10-12% damage and survival difference between a 0* and a 4* at the same level split among multiple people is negligible at best. For an incredibly general rule of thumb, it's best not to completely max something out unless it's a 4* or incredibly close to it, as Master and Master Premier are the only uncapped formats. If you're sitting on hundreds of Pokémon and this task seems a LITTLE daunting, use the search box to find your high-tier Pokémon; the search term "3*" will show you all Pokémon with an IV combination of 80-98%, and "4*" will reveal all your perfects (affectionately known as hundos). To get started, these are probably the ones you'll want to look at and favorite.
At the time of writing this, there have been various quality-of-life adjustments that will allow you to bulk power up a Pokémon to a desired level/CP and use all of the resources at once, as well as giving you a preview of how close a particular Pokémon can get to a desired CP cap for a specific League.
Let's look at Altaria, a very solid and popular pick in Great League:
The one on the right has a significantly lower Attack IV, but because of that, it reaches a higher level, which gives it more access to its uncapped base stats. The next two diagrams are screenshots from GO Stadium breaking down their individual ranks. The perfect one on the left on paper looks amazing, but in a CP-capped format, having higher stats means a higher CP earlier, which results in a lower ranking; the one on the right is the better one by a significant margin.
In CP-capped formats, VERY generally speaking, the more levels you can fit below the cap, the better. This can be achieved by having a lower Attack stat, since the CP is affected by its value the most. In most cases that don't depend on certain damage thresholds, an ideal PvP Pokémon in Great/Ultra League will have a much lower Attack stat compared to its ideal PvE counterparts. Ultimately this is a degree of min-maxing that is similar to the PvE experience, where numbers can matter marginally at best between a 4* Pokémon and its 0/15/15 PvP counterpart. I mean, if I'm being real for a moment, all it results in is the Altaria on the right having ~3 less Attack but 5 more Defense and 5 more HP. It doesn't seem like a lot in the moment, but the main distinction is that this isn't a setting where you bring fleets of Pokémon with allies to take down one singular enemy, this is a "wow I get three and that's it" scenario; it's important you make it count. In most GL/UL cases, this degree of optimization isn't something to concern yourself with immediately if you're looking to casually dive into it for the first time or ladder to rank 7-8, and thankfully in open Master/Master Premier, it's just a straight shot case of dumping Stardust and Candy into your best one.
One last footnote to this that adds a new flavor to certain interactions: if two Pokémon fire off charge moves at the exact same time, the one with the higher Attack stat will go first (ties are coinflips). This makes metagames with popular mirror matches a lot more high stakes, as you may opt to sacrifice some IVs in exchange for some extra base stats, but if you don't go first in mirrors/similar charge scenarios, then it might all be in vain. There's quite a bit of nuance that goes into finding the perfect fit, but VERY generally speaking, you should just grab the highest-IV Pokémon you have and you'll be fine in lower and mid-ranks.
Your freshly caught or hatched Pokémon will have a fast attack and one charge attack. The ability to add a second charge attack is there, and the cost to unlock it will vary according to the rarity of the Pokémon. For PvE in raid scenarios, this isn't something you need to do. Versus Gyms, it can have some utility if you’re not trying to make different teams every time, but usually it ends up being a convenience that is a byproduct of PvP prep. For PvP, this is a very necessary and potentially very expensive step.
Let's take a look at the New Attack button on this Gyarados and this Mewtwo:
Magikarp is considered a fairly common spawn in that it hatches out of 2k eggs, it exists in various forms of research and is somewhat easy to find in rainy conditions and also near correctly geocoded large bodies of water. Given that information, the cost of the second attack is incredibly low. As the rarity of the Pokémon increases, so does the cost to give it the extra viability—Mewtwo being a legendary automatically hikes the prices up to the max. These attacks' costs will range from 10k Stardust/25 Candies to 100k/100c, so your favorite legendaries will take a little bit more effort to be battle-ready. This can be a little daunting in the team preparation phases, but there are a lot of budget picks that perform incredibly well, such as Whiscash and Altaria (both incredibly potent in Great League) and Pokémon such as starters with their Community Day moves (Hydro Cannon/Frenzy Plant/Blast Burn) carry the benefit of having very powerful moves as well as low Stardust or Candy requirements to prepare owing to their rarity. Baby Pokémon (Azurill/Riolu/Togepi/etc) have a second attack cost of 10k/25c at this stage, so if you're thinking about using it, definitely pull the trigger before you evolve it. It doesn't have to be expensive, but your mileage will certainly vary based on what route you'd like to take.
In either of the screenshots above, there is a Gyms and Raids section and a Trainer Battles section for the moves. This contains information for how certain moves will behave in a PvP setting and in Raids. This tab will also list if a move has stat-boosting or reducing potential, which, to recap again, does not apply to Gym battles and Raids (the Raid Bosses will not buff or debuff themselves either). For simplicity's sake, Gyms and Raids are the sections that most will need to look at for normal Raid and Gym battling gameplay; the trainer battle section will oftentimes have different numbers tied to each attack for game balance purposes. Psycho Cut for example does less damage in trainer battles, and Focus Blast does more damage to ensure more decisive KOs. Your mileage will definitely vary from Pokémon to Pokémon in a PvE to PvP format; there are many examples of moves getting changed in energy requirements, and the bars themselves aren't an accurate representation of how much energy a move's cost specifically changed between the two. If you're unsure of how using a particular Pokémon would feel, you can take it with you to a PvE team leader fight and a basic Gym battle or Raid to really get a feel for the performance changes in both scenarios, or you can use some of the resources I mentioned at the very beginning to read up on some numbers.
If you're not satisfied with the moves your Pokémon had when you caught it, there are TMs: basic Fast/Charge TMs are single-use and will shuffle a move in that Pokémon's movepool to another one, while the recently introduced and exceedingly rare Elite TM allows you to select a move (even legacy moves from Community Days and special events!). We'll use my Glaceon for an example (DPS values screenshot from https://pokemon.gameinfo.io/en/pokemon/471-glaceon):
Defensive in this screenshot is reserved for how it will perform as a Gym defender, so meatier fast attack hits are most desirable in those instances. Given that I just recently evolved this with this set, I would have to use a fast TM to swap Ice Shard for Frost Breath, and since it has Icy Wind, Avalanche, and Ice Beam in its charge movepool, I would need to use at least one Charge TM to get what I need.
RNG being a factor in getting ideal movesets is a common and frustrating mechanic. The recently introduced Elite TM lets you pick ANY move that Pokémon has ever been able to learn (even event exclusive and other legacy moves), but it is a rarity reserved for season end rewards and other infrequent distributions.
Closing Thoughts
I think I've covered a good number of the basics in terms of ground rules and "initial training"; taking these basic concepts and principles and applying them to your existing Pokémon will leave you with a solid foundation to step into the ladder of ranked play with some degree of confidence. With the gift basket of knowledge I've left on your doorsteps, I would also like to put an asterisk on it all: proceed with some degree of caution. Even after a lot of playtime I still consider the GBL as a whole to be in a semi-refined public beta; there's a lot of connection issues that can result in phantom extra shields, session disconnections where your opponent pummels you as you are helpless to watch, and, on rare occasion,s certain fast attacks can cause the battle's connection to hang and time out.
Even considering all of this, though, when it's working, it's a lot of fun and is a refreshing diet ATB take on the core gameplay we all know and love. It's quite the love/hate relationship with the system, since the technical difficulties can make real-time interactions go horribly wrong, but when it works I adore it in a special and unique way that the MSG just doesn't quite hit for me. Thanks for reading, if you have any questions or comments, you can catch me on Twitter or Twitch (/elodicolo), and I hope to see you all soon with some more Pokémon Go content!
- E-Lo
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