"Using stardust efficiently to be the very best, like no one ever was"

#PokemonGO: What advice would you give to trainers about how to strengthen their pokemon and the best way to use their resources? Recently, I’ve been giving this some thought and want to offer three broad pieces of advice.(Note: I’m making two important assumptions. First, that a player’s goal is to be as strong a trainer as possible given their level and available stardust, candy, and pokemon. Second, that stardust is the most limited resource, meaning that it will run out before other resources as trainers work to become stronger. This second assumption holds true for most situations but is less true for powering up legendaries or pseudo-legendaries. In this case, trainers may not have the pokemon at all or may lack the candy or rare candy to power them up.)With these assumptions in mind, here’s the advice I would give:(1). Don’t spend stardust if you can help it (though don’t horde it either! It doesn’t do any good sitting in your inventory. We’re not gaining interest on it). Instead, catch and evolve weather-boosted pokemon. With weather-boosted pokemon maxing out at five levels higher than your current trainer level, capping out at level 35, this is a huge power boost. The best part about the weather system is that it begins to narrow the “strength gap” between players at different levels. Take advantage of this and catch those high CP mon, then evolve and use them right away. I duo’d Rayquaza in snowy weather because of all of the weather-boosted Spheal I was able to catch (plus some judicious application of stardust, more on that later). My Machamp team is almost all wild, weather-boosted catches at levels 33-35 that I’ve since powered up to the last Tyranitar breakpoint. These strong teams were possible without spending huge amounts of stardust because of weather-boosted spawns. The only limiting factor here is the candy needed to evolve.(2). Forget about IVs (most of the time). This is probably the most controversial piece of advice I would give. Except for when they do, IVs don’t matter. For me, the order of importance goes (1) the Pokemon’s species > (2) its level and CP > (3) its moves > (4) its IVs. It’s better to use that 70% IV, level 32 Houndoom you got during the dog event rather than using that 93% IV, level 20 Tyranitar you got from a raid. Instead of focusing on IVs, the focus should be on getting (and perhaps powering up, see point three) a variety of good pokemon and strong counters to important raid bosses. To figure out which pokemon these are, I recommend playing around with pokebattler.com, this post, this post and accompanying spreadsheet, and the ranking lists on (pokemongo.gamepress.gg/)[https://pokemongo.gamepress.gg/attackers-tier-list].(3). Spend stardust to improve your raid teams and counters “from the top” and only power-up past level 30 if you’ve got a good reason to do so. Remember how I argued that IVs don’t matter? Well they do in two cases. First, to hit a particular damage or bulk break-point for a particular raid boss (important if you are trying to short-man or solo a raid boss). Second, to help us decide which pokemon to power up and spend our precious stardust on. This is necessary to either fill out a raid party or to fill a need not filled by wild weather-boosted catches. Two important details are important to keep in mind when powering up pokemon: power-up costs increase consistently the higher the pokemon’s level and CP gained is halved after level 30. Because of this, I wouldn’t recommend powering up pokemon past level 30, unless you’ve already got a strong team and powering up a pokemon past 30 would make that team better. (This could mean powering up a pokemon already on that team or powering up a pokemon to replace a member of that team. It’s typically good practice to improve your teams from the top down because you can only ever take six Pokemon into battle at a time anyway.)To understand why I wouldn’t recommend powering up past level 30, let’s look at a graph of how much it costs in stardust to increase a pokemon’s CP by 1 at each level. (For this analysis, I used Charizard in honor of our recent community day but the analysis holds true for all pokemon). This graph takes into account both the increased power-up costs at each odd level and the halving of CP gains at level 30.Graph of the cost in stardust for a single point of CP at each levelThe graph confirms what we already know; it gets really expensive to power up a Pokemon the closer it gets to level 40 and the return on investment dwindles pretty rapidly. What I hope the graph makes clear, though, is just how much less valuable stardust becomes at these higher-level power-ups. For Charizard, at level 35, you’re paying nearly 3 times the stardust for each point of CP that you did at level 30. To get to level 40, you’re paying 4 times the stardust for each CP point compared to level 30. In terms of total investment, to get your Charizard from level 20 to level 30 costs 75,000 stardust. This nets you 28.6% of Charizard’s max CP. To get to level 35 from level 30 costs 63,000 stardust and only increases Charizard’s CP% by 7.2%. This rapid decrease in the return on investment for spending stardust, coupled with the fact that a Pokemon hits about 85% of its total CP at level 30 and about 90% by 33, to me means that powering up a Pokemon past level 30 requires a strong justification. Some justifications might be (1) to hit an important breakpoint, (2) to improve a battle team “from the top” after getting a sufficient number of useful counters, (3) because you’ve got stardust to burn, or (4) just because you want to (in my opinion, always a valid reason! Say hello “Zeus”, my maxed out Jolteon). Ultimately, my hope is that seeing the stardust cost for each point of CP gained at various levels will help us make more informed decisions about getting the most out of our stardust.TL;DR: If you want to be the very best and are worried about getting the most out of your stardust, catch and evolve weather-boosted pokemon, don’t worry so much about IVs, and, when you do power-up a pokemon, make sure you’ve got a strong reason to power it up past level 30. After level 30, the return on investment for stardust drops rapidly as the stardust cost for each point of CP greatly increases. via /r/TheSilphRoad https://ift.tt/2KPeFK7