End-game is pretty much all about gyms.  Catching trash pokemon becomes harder and harder, so you need the dust from gym battles to keep leveling up your pokemon.  And with coins, you can buy more incubators for more chances for rares. 

Someone posted this: https://goo.gl/mDlCQm

Which ranks pokemon based on attack [attack stat * attack move] * defense.  From this, it's pretty easy to determine optimal strategies, and the number of good pokemon is actually quite limited, which is unfortunate.  Most people won't get mew/mewtwo and any legendaries (which seems to be the case at this point at least), which really limits the tier 1 pokemon.

Vaporeon: OP as hell, to the point of possibly being not WAI.  Highest attack power and really easy to get.  If you can't get any other tier 1 pokemon (all of which are rare) just get 3x vaporeon.  Eevee are all over the place.  Pretty much any pokemon that isn't a hard counter to vaporeon will just melt. 

Snorlax: Huge stats, strong defender with no real weaknesses.  Also, incredibly rare.  I actually don't like Snorlax because you can't leverage any elemental weakness with him, and trying to defend gyms for any length of time is pointless. 

Dragonite: Overall strong attacker, rare, but not as rare as others.  There are some Dratini farms scattered around.  Counters vaporeon and has a bunch of resistances to elemental types (except for ice which is 2x weak). 

Lapras: one of the few ice type pokemon with a main ice attack, hard counters Dragonite.  Extremely rare.  Also, really good as a defender, possibly better than Snorlax since it'll often force a switch and take up time.  There are very few counters to Lapras; Lapras is water/ice and weak to grass, but grass pokemon are also weak to ice.  Electric pokemon counter, but have terrible stats. 

Poliwrath: Poliwrath is a water/fighting type with high stats.  His best main attack is a strong ground type attack, which means he has advantage over water type pokemon by dealing full damage, including Lapras.  His best charge attack is fighting based, which is strong against ice (Lapras) and also normal (Snorlax).  Pretty decent counter for other tier 1 pokemon. 


Tier 2:
Venosaur, Exeggutor, Gyarados: Good counters to the common water pokemon, including Vaporeon and also holds their own, weakness-wise, against Lapras.  Gyarados has 2x resistance to water, and has dragon as it's main attack type, so it should demolish other water pokemon too.  Gyarados is relatively easy to get if you live by water. 


Slowbro, blastoise, any other water pokemon: Strong, but ultimately just weaker vaporeons.

Alakazam, Hypno, other Psychic types: very high attack power, but very low defense.  No strong matchups in the tier 1 list.  Good for rolling low level gyms, but overall there are better choices (Vaporeon).

Raichu, Jolteon, electric types: terrible stats, but strong against water types and Lapras.  But given the rarity of Lapras, Gyarados and grass types are better. 

Flareon, Arcanine, fire types: good stats and strong against bug types and grass types, but gets wasted vs. water type supremacy. 


Lineup: you have enough dust to max out ~3-4 pokemon in my experience so far (level 22).  Everything else should be sideboarded and not wasting any dust on them - basically, high CP pokemon you can get from evolving stuff in your area. 

Ideal mainboard:
Vaporeon
Dragonite - alternatives: Gyarados, Vaporeon, Snorlax
Lapras - alternatives: Golduck (with ice beam special)
Poliwrath- alternatives: Gyarados, Exeggutor

Sideboard (example):
Venosaur, Exeggutor, Gyarados
Water types: Vaporeon, Tentacruel, Golducks
Electric types: Raichu, Jolteon

It doesn't say Charizard reigns supreme, so I cannot fully trust this.

On further investigation, some of above analysis was wrong.  Not about the relative ranking of Pokemon, but by underestimating just how skewed the ranking is.  Above I suggested Poliwrath vs. water types.  But if you compare Poliwrath and Vaporeon against water types, Vaporeon is actually still better despite being at a type disadvantage. 

DPS is proportional the product of attack stat and move power:

Vaporeon: 186 (attack) * 1500 (power) * 0.8 (disadvantage) = 223,200
Poliwrath: 180 (attack) * 1309 (power) = 235,620

So Vaporeon does 95% of the DPS of Poliwrath vs. water types, has stronger defense stats and is extremely better versus pretty much everything else.  Keep in mind that Poliwrath is still a top 10 Pokemon in terms of raw power, it's just that Vaporeon is still just that much better.  The game is totally unbalanced.  =/

I'm actually kind of surprised you can take gyms at level 9, at this point in the game heh.  I wouldn't bother trying to seriously defend a gym.  By all means, make them work for it by putting a decent CP evolution in, but it's not worth putting one of your best in, unless you're going to sleep.  If someone wants to take a gym from you, they will.

I just reached 20 today, which took awhile; is 30 + considered endgame, or is it more like 25 +?

Either way, it's hard to say with conviction that the current state of things in the game, as it relates to balance, is intended. The game's notorious right now for having so many bugs (3 step glitch, freezing pokeball glitch, etc), that it wouldn't surprise my that Vaporeon's power level is so ridiculous atm. But then again, water pokemon in general have always had a reputation for being extremely bulky and hard to take down, so it makes sense if they have such high stamina, as they did in the other games (read: Vaporeon, Tentacruel, Suicune, Swampert, Lapras, Slowbro, Starmie, and so many more).

Or maybe this was sort of a stroke of genius; Flareon for the first 3 generations was infamous for having an absurdly high ATTACK stat, but with no physical attacks to make use of it, and Jolteon had a stupidly restrictive moveset. Vaporeon was the only one who was really graced with both a good moveset and stats to boot.

As you get to the endgame, do you find that you can more easily hold down your gyms? Where I live, I'll find that every gym nearby changes colors it seems every day. Getting a coin bonus higher than 1 gym per day is pretty much impossible for me, and I have a hard time seeing anyone being able to do so unless they have SEVERAL friends and all regularly coordinate their gym excursions. There are simply too many people out there playing the game, and not enough gyms to accommodate them IMO. The best strategy for me it seems is to just conquer one gym and immediately claim my 10 coins, then redo that process 21 hours later--being able to station a pokemon at a gym and have it standing there 21 hours later is a rarer find than a Tome in DDO these days.

[edit] Oh, also, if you didn't know about it already, there's a pretty handy subreddit which talks more in-depth about the game: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSilphRoad/ . Pretty neat stuff.

I see. Agree with you on the Silph Road--it's one of those subs that I'd visit every so often b/c of the content, but never really get involved with because the general culture just isn't me.

The longest I've held a gym was 10 hours, and then it got knocked out... that was a level 7 gym with 7 very high level defenders, and even then, it wasn't enough. Not sure how viable gyms will be, even if you get your pokemon to absurdly high CPs; I think I'll stick with my "defend 1 gym per day, get 10 coins per day" strategy for the time being.

LagMonsterrrrrr wrote on Aug 10^th, 2016 at 9:10am:


And more gayer.

AtomicMew wrote on Aug 10^th, 2016 at 5:38pm:

Thanks, I'll never be a pro at this, but being able to take my kid to a gym and not look like a complete idiot is priceless. I appreciate the time you took to put this together.

Another tier 2 pokemon seems to be Wigglytuff, who is deceptively strong.  Weak defensive stats, but happens to have a very strong moveset means he has very high DPS (pound highest deeps quick attack in the game + same-type bonus).  Weak stats means his CP is much lower than his overall power.  Also resistant to dragonite, due to being fairy type.  But of course, not as good against Dragonites as ice types.

My wife and daughter both caught a dragonite yesterday as we were driving back from lunch.  Just randomly appeared on this back road by our house.  I thought my son was going to kill them when he found out.  He wouldn't talk to either of them for a few hours.  This is serious business.

Friendship wrote on Aug 17^th, 2016 at 3:07pm:


Or you could get a life.  Or end what you think you have of a life.

Friendship wrote on Aug 17^th, 2016 at 3:07pm:


The problem with Jolteon is that his raw stats didn't translate well from the original game.  His raw power and max CP is way, way down there, about a half compared to an equal level Vaporeon.  If you can't get a Dragonite, you could try Exeggutor or Venusaur ideally.  Other possible options are Gyarados or Poliwrath with mudshot.

Where I am, there are magikarp all over the place.  I have 2000 magikarp candy lol.