Pokemon Go announces massive changes to gym system, raid battle, new items

Niantic’s new gym system promises to shake the game up, adding a co-op mode and new items along the way

Niantic has made a huge announcement regarding the way gyms work in Pokemon Go, and it’s a doozy. The gym system is getting a major overhaul that changes how one of the key features of the game works, finally answering one of the biggest complaints players have. Because gyms are ostensibly the purpose of the game, battling against opposing mons and trying to be the best around, this promises to shift the entire meta of the game.

Up until now, gyms have held 10 Pokemon, sorted from lowest to highest CP. In practice, this means that most gyms are packed with a handful of mons — most with multiple of some high-powered mons like Dragonite and Gyarados. The lack of multiplayer and the generally repetitive nature of battle has led to the gym system becoming extremely stale for many players.

On June 19, Niantic announced that all of this would be changing. To begin with, only one of each type of mon can be in a gym, so no more seeing nine rhydon’s behind a blissey. Additionally, the number of slots will be reduced from ten to six, and battles will be carried out in the order that the Pokemon were added to the gym rather than from lowest to highest CP.

The biggest shift will be a new motivation system for Pokemon. Up until now, gyms have had a prestige level, up to ten, and each time the prestige dropped below a certain amount the level was reduced, dropping the lowest CP mon out. With the new system, each individual mon will have their own rating, and once it drops to zero it will be kicked out and returned to the player. The motivation level can be modified, however, with the addition of new berries — which can be added by any player from the same team. Presumably, this means that the player must be close enough to interact with the gym to feed the berries instead of being able to do it remotely. Gyms will also contain poke stops as well, to help keep your inventory up.

While all of this is a much-needed overhaul to the gym system, that’s not even the most exciting part. Raid battles are coming, bringing an entirely new co-op experience to the game. A raid Boss will now be able to appear at a gym, first as an egg with a countdown timer, then as an extremely powerful boss which players can battle together. This is reminiscent of the initial trailer for the game, in which thousands of players were gathered in Times Square to simultaneously battle a Mewtwo together — though it appears that each raid battle will have a max of 20 players for now. Based on photos from the press release, the egg will appear in the nearby tracker like pokemon do now.

Raid battles will require raid passes to play, and only one is available per day for free, though others can be purchased in the shop. Only one pass can be held at a time. Additionally, each raid battle will have a time limit of five minutes, and it seems that winning the battle doesn’t guarantee getting the rare pokemon, as it looks like you will be placed into a normal encounter with it to catch it the old-fashioned way.

Other changes include new items. Golden razz berries, like their normal counterparts, will increase the likelihood of catching a mon and can also be used to fill motivation meters in gym mons. Rare candies will be able to be used on any mon to evolve and level up — very helpful if you have a rare mon that needs leveling up but have been unable to find additional ones of their species. Two types of technical machines will also be added, allowing players to change attacks of their mon. This is a huge help to those of us who evolved Gyarados only to get twister as the charge move.

Obviously, this is all huge news for PoGo faithful. How and when it will be rolled out is unknown currently, though the Pokemon Go Fest in Chicago this week is certainly a good bet. Gyms will all temporarily be disabled while the fixes are made, and all mons will be kicked back to their players.