"Let's talk about gym training with 6 pokemon"

#PokemonGO: There's been a lot of discussion with the new change in gym training about the annoyance or about possible benefits. Let's flush this out a bit more.Annoyance: If you only want to train the lowest defender you need to fill 5 spare slots. To combat this you should sort a-z and have 5+ disposable 10 cp 'mon labeled .name or something along those lines. This puts them at the top of your list and minimized the time those extra 10 clicks take so at least it's not 10 clicks and a bunch of scrolling. If it's just doing this, the change is strictly an annoyance.There are a couple things that can be useful about the change though. Let's talk about buffer, force, cluster, and bypass options.1st is mistake-buffer option. Here rather than have 1 'mon at half CP we have one at half CP and our next ideal candidate at less than half. If we miss a dodge or two we can swap over to our spare. If we don't miss a dodge the potion usage is as low as it was and the old cost is a few more seconds to select the second attacker, if we do miss a dodge it isn't a wasted battle like it used to be, nor are all of the heals on that pokemon useless: it's done a chunk of damage and we finish the fight with the backup. Here say we have a 2100 vape defender and a 990 parasect attacker. Doable but very tight match. If we use a 880 parasect as backup or even just a 940 vape as backup we can finish the fight if we miss 1 or 2 dodges.A variant of this is brute force method for 1000 prestige by using two attackers against the lowest defender when we couldn't normally get 1000 prestige by killing with only one attacker. This can be a bit more expensive on potions depending on the specific hp amounts involved but may be the fastest way to prestige up a gym when we don't have 1000 point options for single attackers on our team.Cluster is the most attractive option of the new gym training method. If there are a tight cluster of CPs at the bottom of the gym with an annoying fight at the bottom but 1-3 squishy defenders after that with very slightly higher CP we can force our way through the bottom defender, maybe even using 2 'mon to brute force, but then we can get our bread and butter easy fights after that with our extra 4 attackers. For example I just fought a gym with a 1362 snorelax on the bottom and 2x flareon just over 1400 right after that. I forced my way through the snorelax with 2x 680ish cp attackers but then used one 690 vape to take out both flareon netting nearly 3k prestige for my troubles. It used to be there was no good way to reliably dig into weak 2nd or 3rd tier defenders, but with 6 attackers we can do just that.Well, that's a bit of a lie, there was one old situation, a low CP annoying attacker followed by a high CP squishy. The old method was if there was a big enough CP gap you could blow through the 1st defender and the second with your one attacker which was under the CP of the second and net reasonable prestige.This brings us to our final method, bypass. With bypass we get an even easier time of doing this. Here essentially we use a buffer pokemon to kill the first tough defender then get fresh pokes to take out the easy target. Say there's a 900 hypno followed by a 2100 flareon. We could probably get through both with a 1400ish vape pretty easy but a 1050 might be a tough fight. We certainly couldn't go against a 900 hypno 2100 flareon 2200 flareon on a 1050 vape. We might however use a 1050 anything to beat that hypno then have a fresh 1050 vape to take on the higher level squishy targets. The 900 hypno won't yield great prestige but at least it won't stop us from getting great returns on the higher level easy targets. We might even be able to do a 890 something to defeat the hypno for 500+ prestige then follow with 2x 800-899 vapes or maybe combine it with a bit more brute force and 3x 700-899 vapes if we don't have a tight enough cp range of viable attackers either style there would net us 2500 for our efforts.Of course, any slots not used by actual attackers can go to spare mistake-buffer slots or our 10 cp fillers. Any other thoughts or methods I've missed here? Any comments on any of the strategies I've laid out? What's your 2 cents on the subject? via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2ewTG2G