Gym Battles

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See also: Gyms

Basic Information

In a Gym Battle, you can perform 4 actions:

• Standard Move: tap once on the screen. Your Pokemon will perform a Standard Move every tap.

• Special Move: Watch the blue bar(s) underneath your Pokémon’s HP. As you perform standard moves, it will fill up. One blue block means you can execute a special move, by pressing and holding the screen.

• Dodge: Swipe left or right, or tap the left or right side of the screen to dodge incoming attacks.

• Switch Pokémon: Tap the up-down-arrow button on the bottom-right of the screen to switch the current Pokémon with another one.

Tips and Tricks

• Use Dodge: In your first battles, you’ll probably just tap mindlessly away at the attack buttons, and this is probably a decent strategy if your Pokémon has a much higher CP than its opponent. But in order to win close battles, or battles where you are the underdog, you will need to get good at dodging, particularly at dodging enemy Special Moves. See How to Defeat Any Gym for dodge techniques.

• Use Special Move as soon as it is available it not always good - while you might be tempted to use the Special Move ASAP, it might be best to wait until it can be used as a finishing blow. Because the special move will leave your Pokemon unable to dodge for a short period of time, leaving it open to enemy attacks. Also be sure to take advantage this by aggressively attacking your enemies when they are using a Special Move.

• Know your Types: Before going into battle, make sure to check your enemy’s type and select your Pokemon with advantageous Moves against that type.

• Swap for Types: While swapping out a Pokémon leaves it vulnerable to attack for a few seconds, it is still advantageous to do it in certain situations such as having a Fire type against a Water type.

• Team up with allies when tacking a Gym: Group up with other members of your Team to attack an enemy Gym. Your teammate can attack the same enemy Pokémon as you and allow you guys to reduce the Gym's Prestige and take it down faster.

• Don’t let the Pokémon you want to defend the gym faint: If you successfully take a gym, you won’t be able to leave behind a fainted Pokémon to defend it. So make sure your preferred choice survives the battle.

• The defending Pokemon will charge out of the gate and use two Standard Moves back-to-back. You can learn to dodge the opening attacks. Remember to wait for the yellow flash before swiping sideways to dodge.

Healing Wounded Pokemon

After a battle, you can heal your wounded Pokemon with 2 types of items: Revives and Potions.

• Revives restores fainted Pokemon

• Potions help non-fainted Pokemon recover HP. There are 3 types of Potions: Potion (20 HP), Super Potion (50 HP), Hyper Potion (200 HP).

Note that during Training, battle with friendly Gyms, when your Pokemon is defeated, its HP is brought to 1. This way your won't need to waste your revive on it, just use a potion.