Tuesday Tip: Let's talk about pokémon!

[inkstone]

I thought it'd be useful to have a catch-all post for all things pokémon. They are what you're trying to catch in this game, right? And with the release of the in-game appraisal system, I figure some people might have some questions.

Here are the basics:

• Each pokémon is unique. It has visible values for CP and HP, in addition to movesets that can vary from mon to mon within a species.


• Every pokémon also has hidden stats called individual values (IVs) for attack, defense, and stamina. The CP & HP values are visible renderings of these IVs. The new in-game appraisal system gives you the range for these hidden values.


• When you level up as a trainer, you will start seeing pokémon with higher CP but to only a certain extent. The CP of pokémon hatched from eggs stop scaling at level 20 and the CP of pokémon caught in the wild stop scaling at level 30.


• The trainer level cap, though, is level 40. So you can keep powering up your pokémon with stardust and candy past level 30 until you hit the cap.

There are other nuances to be found here, but I find they vary from trainer to trainer. Some people start powering up their pokémon right away. Others wait until they hit level 30. Some people are torn. I thought that in addition to sharing general tips about pokémon, we could also use the comments to ask advice about our mon.

So let's have it!

Comments

[monanotlisa]

Thanks for this!

The powerup question is a good one -- like in the discussion in my previous post, I think it really depends on your environment:

If I lived far west in San Francisco, or far out in the 'burbs of the East Bay, where the gyms are weak and/or their defenders are low-CP Pokémon, I probably wouldn't have powered up my mon for my nightly gym takeovers...only for excursions o' mine elsewhere, on and off.

Given that I live where I live by the University of California, Berkeley, holy moly, I've been powering up since Day One. :)

[inkstone]

Right. So.

If you read my comment to monanotlisa above, I had been planning to wait until level 30 to start getting serious about powering up my mon and finding the perfect team. Right now, I'm mostly focusing on filling my pokedex (96 caught/98 seen - so salty about chansey & onix!)

But life and mobile games don't work that way, apparently. After some dedicated hunting and catching of oddishes, I was finally able to evolve a Vileplume this past weekend. I love it. It's very cute. I named it Picasso for its petal hat. (I'm weak for cute mon, you know?) Then I checked its IVs.

It's, uh, 15/14/15. 97.8% perfection. Poison/petal blizzard make up its moveset, both of which are STAB since Vileplume is a grass/poison type. I'm level 23, not even close to level 30, but...this seems like a reasonable investment of stardust and candy, right?

[melannen]

Can someone explain movesets in v. small words for someone who has never played a pokemon game before?

I mean I fight gyms by buttonmashing as fast as I can while praying I don't lose the wifi, so it's not super-important, but it would still be kinda nice to understand what they do.

[korafox]

I have a question about powering up Pokemon: if you've got one that you mean to evolve, which is better, boosting its CP before or after evolution?

[malnpudl]

I have a question and I don't know if it should go here or in its own post.

As I'm entirely new to the Poke-universe -- and 58 years old and childless -- this game is my very first exposure to everything except Pikachu.

I'm stumbling over pronunciations. Is there a definitive guide? I found this webpage but I'm having a very hard time believing that some of these are correct.

Gyrados is my biggest puzzler. My brain wants to make it jer-RAH-dose or JYE-rah-dose or JEER-uh-dose. But the above linked web page says it's GAR-i-dose and that flat out makes my brain hurt.

And Ponyta is supposed to be poh-NEE-tah? Seriously? *blinks*

Anyone else have trouble with this? Input? Opinions? Rants?

[dickgrayson]

Oh I might push to level 30 then relax more...thank you! :D