After the initial wave of hype over the new raid battles and the new gym system, I’ve been able to find new things about gyms.
For one, I’ve noticed that gyms have been really buggy when you try and collect the pokestop. The camera randomly jumps back down after initially showing the pokestop. It’s strange. You cannot place multiple of the same pokemon in the same gym at the same time (e.g. if I put Snorlax in the gym, no one else can put Snorlax in the gym unless I get kicked out). The maximum number of defenders in a gym is 6, and there is no more “gym level up system,” which means you cannot level up your gym to level 10, which means you can get rid of all those pokemon that you’ve been keeping for leveling up gyms.
You can also feed your pokemon berries if someone attacks it, but you can only feed it a certain amount before your pokemon grows tired of that berry and wants golden razz berries. Any berry works: pinap, razz, and nanab. You receive 20 stardust for feeding any pokemon (including your own) and have a very small chance of receiving that pokemon’s candy. If someone is attacking the gym, you could in theory infinitely feed your pokemon, as long as you have enough golden razz berries.
The coin limit is now 50 pokecoins/day, and you receive 1 pokecoin for every 10 minutes your pokemon defends the gym, rounded down. For example, if you defend your gym for 149 minutes, you will receive 14 pokecoins. The game gives you notifications whenever your pokemon returns from the gym and it will tell you how many coins you have received.
Also, I did a few more raids. It seems like each person receives different rewards, such as different amounts of golden razz berries, revives, etc., but everyone always receives 3000 xp points for winning the raid battle. The Charged TM and the Fast TM items are really rare to get in raid battles. The cp’s are also buggy, the one you catch with premier balls sometimes has a different cp than the one that shows up in your pokemon bag.
You also get the normal amount of candies and stardust for every raid pokemon that you catch:
- 1st Evolution Pokemon: 100 Stardust + 1 Candy
- 2nd Evolution Pokemon: 300 Stardust + 5 Candies
- 3rd Evolution Pokemon: 500 Stardust + 10 Candies
Since Venusaur is a 3rd evolution (Bulbasaur –> Ivysaur –> Venusaur), I received 10 Bulbasaur candies and 500 Stardust.
Difficulty 1 and 2 raids are able to be done by yourself. You can defeat those with plenty of time remaining. Difficulty 3 raids require a few people, and Difficulty 4 raids require at the super-bare minimum of 4 people. It is possible to defeat a difficulty 4 raid with four people, but it is extraordinarily difficult: there cannot be any lag (infinite death loops, charge attacks not working, loading, etc), so to be safe, we’ll say that the minimum amount of people you need for a difficulty 4 raid is 5 people.
We haven’t fought many difficulty 3 raids, though, so we’ll update you later on that.