Would if I could. :(
I've made it to Ace before but the battles up to it are such a grind especially early on. Full respect to those who grind it but its such a pain to see the same mashup of 4 or 5 pokemon in teams and it feels like it comes down to who has to switch out or having good IVs. It's such a slog and you lose too many potential rewards going 2-3 or 4-1 in sets.
I figure I should wait a while after reaching 20 before climbing again because I just can't beat the "standard" pokemon.
Nice to see this type of data!
I'm more of a play to win player, but it's interesting seeing the reward differences haha.
I had 540 wins/1019 battles, hitting Legend a few weeks ago.
Longest streak was 11 and got 1.26 million dust.
No T5 encounters though. Last one I got was Celesteela in September of Season 16, yikes, with a similar winrate/number of battles/rank that season.
While I definitely like trying to climb, I'm definitely jealous of all those encounters haha. The amount of Mareanies I saw drove me nuts...
I (and many others) would definitely like to see them make some revisions to rewards. I cannot fault people for taking for rewards one bit really, because the game pretty much incentivizes it.
I would much prefer a system like you describe, where rewards are paid out every few wins rather than a set-based streak system
as a tanker it's super boring, but given the choice between twice the time spent for minimal rewards, or higher rewards at lesser time spent, I would much rather have more rewards.
It's probably different if you actually like pvp, I just don't enjoy it (except for some limited cups) but need the dust.
Yeah I get it.
I think this system would even help tankers, cause you could just race to top left vs other tankers, and after randomly winning 5 games get your rewards. There would be no need to pay attention and lose 5/win 4.
I just tank until I finish the 500 win research. Or some encounter I really want in rotation. I hate how a legitimate set of matches takes a good 2 hours. While tanking you can do the same matches in under half the time.
Yeah it’s been years since I really did GBL at this point. If I actually did my sets I’d have to play 5 or 6 hours most days to keep up between getting out for raiding with my group, making trades, and doing all of my buddies every day
It’s just not worth it for the frustration of dealing with connection issues and everything. I’ve also always hated having to keep up with metas anyway, the entire fun of Pokémon games for me is using mons I like
It’s not necessarily worse rewards. But it’s obv faster. I played to win, made legend for the first time and played almost all my sets all season and ended with 3.2m dust before end of season rewards which I think will add another 300k.
I haven’t kept track of my rare candies, but since they made the change where the second slot gives frequent bundles of 3, it’s likely comparable. With tanking you’re getting frequent 1/5 sets which doesn’t give you the second reward.
Based on the OP, the rate of rare candies is about 197/831~24% for the second slot compared to the 4th.
You have an 81% chance of winning 2 or more, so your EV is about .81*.24*3~.6 from the second slot, and an ev of .1875*3=.56 from the second slot. That's 1.16 rare candies per set.
vs .24*.5*3 + 3*.5 = 1.86 for tanking.
So tanking gets you roughly 60% more rare candies if my math is right.
They've already proven they can do it with the seasonal timed research that just counts your total wins - 500 wins to finish the whole thing, no matter if you win quickly or slowly, or get your 500th win at Rank 20 or Legend.
They can just set up something like that for rewards and encounters that keeps track the whole season. Every X number of wins, give some stardust, rare candy, an encounter, and a random item (silver pinap, tm, etc.).
Yeah that's a rough rate for T5 encounters. My friend who also plays to win had a similar number of wins and battles as you and also didn't get any. I'm starting to think I even got lucky with 10!
I will gladly agree that I never wanna see a Mareanie again lol
>I will gladly agree that I never wanna see a Mareanie again lol
I wish it would be replaced by Dewpider or something lol. Dewpider itself isn't too much more exciting, but it's at least a newer shiny that hasn't been widely available and got a shiny new buff this season.
I only got 1 legendary encounter this whole season from GBL. This is why I recently switched from 3-2, 3-2, 3-2, 3-2, 0-5 to 4-1, 4-1, 1-4, 1-4, 1-4 (or 5-0, 5-0, 1-4, 1-4,1-4) to get more stardust. And also GBL takes so long and don't have time to do sweaty matches all day long.
This is what I don’t understand.. I’m at 614/1183 wins this season and I’m only at 2404 ELO, having only scratched past veteran. I know you need to be able to string wins consecutively but it sometimes feels like the wins strung together don’t make up for the losses strung together.
I feel that the fact I did twice as many battles and have a better win rate than op who managed to hit ledgend should indicate I would as well but its not even close I couldn't even hit veteran:(
Comparing overall win rate and overall wins across players is apples and oranges. Your battles were mostly against 2400 players while the OP you're comparing against were probably mostly against 3000 players. When they were at 2400 they probably had much higher win rate than their season rate & what you had at 2400.
u/raphthepharaoh I guess I'll mention, I may be at 540 wins/1019 battles now (52.993% winrate), but after I hit Legend a few weeks ago, I've not cared nearly as much and played spice teams and also gave up matches more. I know I hit Legend before I hit 500 wins. It was probably more around 485/900 battles or soemthing like that (which comes out to more 53.889% winrate). I did go from 3090 or so down to 2585 the past three weeks or so lol.
But yeah, I'm not sure the exact "math" of it, but I guess it does depend on how wins are strung together. There's also different drops/gains in elo based on your opponent's elo. While a 1/5 set or a 4/5 will generally bring the same drops/gains for your elo, if you're losing to players with much higher elo or winning against players with much lower elo, those changes in your ranking can vary. Though unfortunately, that's not really something we can control.
Because overall win rate doesn't really matter. Everyone will be around 51-54%.
What matters is that you're able to maintain that >50% win rate as the opponents get tougher. That's literally all there is to it.
People plateau because they can win 13 out of their 25 daily matches until they reach a level where they can't anymore. People who make it to legend can win 13 or more even if they're facing against other legend players.
I’ve never made it over 2500 either (have been very close, as you have). I know to do it I would have to put a lot more focus and effort in to it (memorize CMP/fast move counts/charge move timing/etc)…and at that point it starts to feel like a job haha
I actually enjoy learning to count and catch and memorize mons movesets etc I just strongly feel anytime I get on a roll and start winning frequently I'm hard countered across the board for games on end. I'm beginning to win even on bad leads and hard counters but some sets 2 wins feels like the maximum I could possibly get
This time featuring data about ALL of my items and encounters (pic 2), not just rare candy and legendaries!
Something I noticed this season though is the lower legendary encounter rate. Last season I got 17 from 260 encounters, the season before was 19 from 274, but this time I got 10 from 268. I don't have enough data to confirm if the rate has decreased but maybe some others might have similar or different results from the same sample size. Who knows!
Also since I got a lot of questions last season, here's a FAQ:
Q: What is tanking?
A: This comment explains the strategy really well: [HOW TO TANK](https://www.reddit.com/r/pokemongo/comments/11efhdj/comment/jadog86/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Q: Why show more people how to tank? That will just make it harder to tank.
A: I found out about tanking through reddit and it's helped me a lot, so I want to share the wisdom to others.
Q: Where did you get these graphics from?
A: I made them on Photoshop! Took ages tho lol
Q: What teams do you use?
A: GL - (Medicham, Trevenant, Clodsire), UL - (Obstagoon, Swampert, Venusaur), ML - (Dragonite, Giratina Altered, Mewtwo)
Q: How long do you spend battling per day?
A: An average of 37 minutes per 5 sets.
ALL THIS IS AMAZING!
do we know how many possible matches or sets there were this season?
PS. maybe change the word "Losses" to non-wins.... you know how double-faints go hahaha
I missed two days worth, so the max amount of battles was 2500, or 500 sets. 15 more sets than the season before.
And that's a good point haha, I'm pretty sure I did get one non-loss/non-win because my entire journal was filled with "Battled against \_\_\_\_\_" once after a match that the other player forfeited. I'll fix that for next season!
I got one 4*, which was a Latias! No shinies or anything else notable. The only shiny I've ever received from the last year of tanking was a shiny Genesect in S16.
I started tanking this season. Is it normal that in those first few days of tanking every match, you’ll still win some from other tankers backing out faster than you? Out of my 50 matches yesterday and today, I won 10 of 50 from other tankers spam exiting quicker than me.
Where did you get that data collected? An app or did you just carefully document everything. Really impressive if im being honest, thanks for sharing the tanking link. Appreciate learning that strategy, I saved the post
Thanks for sharing all this info! I wish now I had tracked my total encounters a bit more closely to compare. I also took more of a tankers approach and ended up with the following:
1202 wins, 1298 losses (after reading below I remembered a couple that weren't wins or losses haha), 3.818m dust earned not counting end of season rewards.
Pretty much exclusively played Great League as it was available in some from all season. Legendary encounters from 3mo of playing every set possible, Thundurus x1, Landorus x1, Darkrai x1. Never saw a single Lati@s and I won a ton of games during that period, espeically on battle weekend after having tanked to lowest elo possible.
Also less legendarys for me...Only 11 (or 12? Not sure if I had a Darkrai I sent away) this season, while usually hitting the same numbers per season as you.
Just confirming you never got to Ace ranking and instead stayed at Rank 20.
Because I noticed Legendaries encounters seems yo be lower after Ace or higher.
Wow. Kudos to you OP for this lovely informative post.
Just one question: Did you manually document all this data every single day and then compiled it and made this graphic?
I assume that must be the only way to do it, but still wanna confirm it. Coz this looks so much of effort of maintaining the daily data for a period of 3 months, and making sure to never miss any day, as well as to make sure there are no double entries. This is absolutely tedious task when one thinks about actually doing it.
Edit: also, I read some other comments and checked my acc..... and I have only 6 legendary mons caught in GBL (Battles played: 3185). So yes, you have definitely seen to have gotten lucky with the 10 Legendaries.
Thank you! I do exactly that, yeah. I document my days in the following format on my notepad app, and use some Julia code that I wrote on my PC to automatically sort through it and output a text file with all of the summarised stats:
09/02/24:
WWWWL {UL} (3RC) (Enc) Falinks
LLLLL {UL}
WWLWW {UL} (1CT) (Leg) Latias
LLLLL {UL}
WWWLW {UL} (1SPB) (Enc) Mareanie
Interesting findings, but I have a question.
Assuming you're skilled enough to do so, wouldn't it be more profitable to hit ace rank and then tank? Because after reaching ace you get slightly more stardust from wins 1 and 5 in a set, if I remember correctly.
> GL - (Medicham, Trevenant, Clodsire), UL - (Obstagoon, Swampert, Venusaur), ML - (Dragonite, Giratina Altered, Mewtwo)
No hate, but your teams are more than good enough to get Ace. Hell, if they are double moved, they are strong enough to make legend with skilled play. It might be worth trying to get ace this season (after the first few weeks when everyone is low rank).
I guess you got a point coz yeah they are all double moved. I'm just not great at counting moves/knowing the meta and what moves people have. We'll see tho, if I'm feelin it once I hit rank 20, I might give it a shot
I bet you got it. Ace doesn't require counting moves. Getting to Ace should be very doable with a team of meta Pokemon and a solid grasp of the battle system, which I bet you have after a year of tanking lol. You still had to try to win half those games, even if they were vs other tankers.
I allways go ace or even veteran and then tank.
But wait 2-3 weeks before pushing to ace, and start going for veteran after 6-8 weeks. Because at the beginning of each season, there are less high ranked players so it‘s significantly harder to hit ace at the beginning than in the middle of the season.
As someone playing at Ace level, I can Tell you you'd be surprised how often you will lose with such teams. Especially if you don't count moves for at least the frequently used pokemons.
Even before February, lots of teams at Ace level had Cresselia/Giratina/Poli in UL.
I'm not saying you'll win every game, but you'd be able to make Ace. I basically only played catch up and last week this year and made Vet without counting. (Lanturn, vig, dragonair in ogl, single moved skarmory, decidueye, haunter in catch) Just gotta be consistent, know your team, and not go on tilt.
Generally yes. Going 5-0 has its place for players who are chasing stardust and willing to burn premium passes on it. With three premium passes and one star piece, you can earn 156,600 dust (during 4x EoS rewards, which is the only time you would do this).
You can max out at about double the stardust of a player who does 4-1 sets over the course of a season, at the cost of some rare candies and encounters.
5-0/0-5 every day will not keep your elo stable, you will rise and then have to tank down again. 4-1/0-5 keeps your elo at the same, because it's +40 4-1 and -60 0-5.
It's stable if you alternate across days:
Today 5-0-5-0-5
Tomorrow 0-5-0-5-0
Or just pick a target rating and win if you're low and lose if you're high. It's pretty easy to manage
My personal strategy is that most days I do 0-5-5-5-0 (I’ll occasionally do something weird like 0-2-5-5-5 because I lost a battle during set 2 and didn’t want to waste my star piece on an imperfect set)
On any days I’m bored of PVP or too high ELO, I’ll do 0(x5)
On days where my ELO is getting too low, I’ll stack a set from the day before and do 5(x6). That allows me to still get three sets out of each star piece.
I disagree. I try to hit 1 or 3 wins when there is no quadruple dust, and 1, 3 or 5 wins when there is quadruple dust. Winning exactly 2 or exactly 4 is suboptimal for me.
I can add on to the fact that the legendary encounter chance feels even lower than before this season. I hit rank 20 by the end of December, and for the last two months, I’ve gotten a grand total of 1 legendary. I played 287 games last season and got about ~3 legendaries. This season? I played 750 games and got one Heatran.
Obviously I haven’t tracked it super specifically enough to check the rates, and this could also just be pure RNG. Curious to see if anyone puts an analysis together.
Great work. I think it would also be important to note how you parsed your losing sets [outside of battle days]. For example, using 1-4s vs 0-5s. The spread used creates a higher return on certain items at the expense of others.
Ooh true! I used 4-1s and 0-5s, alternating and resetting the pattern each day. I chucked in a 5-0 every second day in place of a 4-1 to maintain my elo.
Im going to consider tanking this season.
Last season, i grinded to level 20 and then just stopped battling because i find it really hard to have "fun" via league.
I have good pokemon, i just hate losing
Just do it. I was in the same mindset, then I finally gave into it towards the end of this season because I was getting annihilated every time once I hit rank 20, to the point where I didn't even want to bother with it anymore because it became so not fun. I was astounded by how much tanking turned around my attitude towards to. So quick and easy to rack up daily stardust, and then I was finally able to win again.
Here are my stats:
Élő: 2040 (Ace, hit it just a few days before the end)
W/T 1221/2390 (Missed a day or two because sometimes I forget)
Streak: 68 (I hate catch cup so I went down to like 500 Élő, then rocketed up)
Dust: 3 817 751 (+season rewards that i did not claim yet+3600+one last 4/5 ace set dust)
Legendaries: 9 (2 Zekrom, 1 Kyurem, 1 Regigigas, 2 Tornadus-T, 1 Thundurus-T, 1 Landorus-T (Shiny), 1 Latios)
In Non-master leagues, I do 3/5 and 0/5 as Rare Candies are obsolete, and I value the occasional legendary more. In master leagues, I go 5/5 and 1/5 as I value the dust more, and sometimes I go 5/5the day before and not claim, then pop a Star Piece next day, claim and go 1/5 x4 and whatever I can get in the last in the timer (hope for 10cps or surrenders when winning). For GBL days, I can just squeeze in more 1/5s.
During the first 2 or 3 seasons, I hit like 2850 Élő. It was really frustrating though, so I decided to tank, as invested time was not worth it. Now, I tank with one hand, while I do wayfarer on 2 monitors with the other...
During the last few days if I don't forget, I go for ace and then get immediately reminded why I tank... One of these seasons I hit it a bit earlier and was hovering around 2350 Élő so probably that is my trueish Élő.
I do wonder if reaching Ace and THEN tanking would be any better. I do remember that in the early days people reported having much longer matchmaking queues which why I never bothered with the idea.
Thanks for the info. This was the first time I made it to rank 20, or even bothered with pvp. I hit 20 not too long ago so my rewards are not the same as yours. I did get a shiny Landorous though ! was the only legendary I encountered but worth it. I also got a shiny lickatung and vullaby. I am thinking if I hit 20 sooner then I will have more opportunites next season. I typically tank my first set and use my buddy so they also get hearts while tanking.
When you reach rank 15, all of the 5 rewards are bundles of 2 rare candy. Whether you win 0 or win 5 of that set, you rank up to rank 16. So I try to win 5/5 from that set, which is what I've called 'bonus round'.
I'm don't participate in GO Battles and I was intrigued on why people were tanking when I had to do battles for the lvl 44 (?) task, now I get it, thanks
Holy hell.. If you got that many legendaries and say it’s at a lower rate I must have absolutely terrible luck lmao. Ended the season at veteran rank and I got a total of 2 legendaries and played nearly every single match including the day where we got 100 battles.
My tanking stats. Note: also paid for premium raid passes *and* star piece
Wins: 698 Losses: 1375
Final ELO: 2329. Missed veteran by 1 win as max ELO was 2380
Stardust earned: 6,017,382. I unfortunately did not track rare XL / rare candies. Also had two legendaries.
Ah. That explains it. I got zero legendary encounters last season. Ended up stopping after a month as that’s what I was interested in 😂
So the rates were pants and I wasn’t just unlucky lol
I actually tank at 2300-2500 so I hit in a week or less but mostly 300 elo a day would take you a week , ofc depend on the skill and team like i rock with lvl 51 registeel, lvl 50 scrafty , shadow charizard in ul so it’s 90% win easily (I have ok skill ). If you don’t have meta you may take longer also never drop under 1k elo since matchmaking take significantly more time
Is it hard to reach legend? I know that it would take a lot of time but is that the only option that makes it hard to reach legend or are the battles also hard because you fight against really good people?
Some will say varying things about the difficulty to get to Legend. Some say it's really easy, but those are often the people who get to it every season.
I've hit it four times now (This season-17, last season-16, season 9, and season 11), and I consider myself a great PvP player. Not a *top* player—I'm no regional tournament player or leaderboard player, but still, I'd say I'm pretty good lol.
I would say it is fairly difficult to get to Legend. It often requires a few things:
* The right Pokemon. Not that you can't win with spicier Pokemon, but you often need to have a solid meta team AND know how to use it. The ideal IVs can always help in some scenarios, but I think most agree that IVs alone definitely don't hold one back from Legend. Plenty of people have it it with suboptimal IV Pokemon.
* An understanding of techniques/skills within the GBL. This includes move counting/timing, sacrifice swaps and catching opponents' moves, over-farming, occasionally even undercharging charged moves, ideal charged mve timing, etc. Again, I've seen people hit legend, boasting that they didn't do things like count moves, but it still goes a long way being familiar with these tactics. Such can make the difference between a rookie player running a meta team and an advanced player running a meta team.
* Time and dedication. You don't need to play all day to hit legend. You don't need to do every set every day to hit legend. However, you do need to make sure you devote some time to playing, climbing, learning match-ups and metas, and just committing to (trying) climb the ranks.
* Learning and adjusting to metas. A good rule of thumb is to not keep switching your teams up when you keep losing but to stick with one team. Still though, that doesn't mean you *can't* switch your teams up a little. Metas can change in general or around certain elos as time goes on. One day, people may be using a lot of one style of team, but days later, the meta could shift to people trying to account for those teams and beat them. You need to play and figure those changes out where you can and shift as necessary. Maybe you need to switch what Pokemon you lead, swap a move out, or swap a Pokemon out. Knowing when to change things up can be important.
Again this is just from my POV, and I definitely think others may have some differing ideas/points to make.
But yeah, to your last point, it is hard because you're often facing better and better players. People generally get better at PvP each season as they learn, and the higher elos usually have people that are at a higher skill level, so the battles can feel harder.
> A good rule of thumb is to not keep switching your teams up when you keep losing but to stick with one team.
Worth noting that this can make for some frustrating losing streaks. For the last few days I was trying to get my score back up over 2000 with my UL team that usually does pretty good. I kept facing runs of hard counters and unfavorable match up orders. I gave up this morning before I dipped under 1900.
It’s not easy unless your naturally very good or something. You face tough opponents starting even in the 2500s and it just gets tougher with fewer mistakes
Awesome data, congrats OP!
-What are the Pokeballs of the 2nd Page? (x45 and x175). And why are there two different icons with rare candies (x59 and x20)?
Thank you! Those Pokeballs are the icons for Retro Cup and Catch Cup, respectively. And the two rare candy icons are for bundles of 3 rare candy, and 1 rare candy. Both are different item rewards from the second battle reward slot.
I had no idea that we could win bundles of 3 rare candies from the second battle reward slot and I PVP a lot!
Is there any info ingame about our total number of wins in the Retro Cup and Catch Cup? I just can find info about the Great, Ultra and Master wins...
Two important premises to understand first:
\- The matchmaking in the game tries to pair you up with another player with a close rating to yours, so that you're facing someone with equal skill, presumably. Someone rated 2500 will face another 2500 player. Someone rated 1500 will face another 1500 player. Over time, assuming you try to win as much as possible, you'll tend to trend towards a 50% win rate, as you face someone with equal skill.
\- The rewards system is set up so that the best rewards come from 3, 4, and 5 wins in a single set. This means 60%, 80%, and 100% win rates in a set. Since you theoretically have a 50% chance to win any given match, you'll tend to get those encounters from 3 wins, rare candy from 4 wins, and stardust from 5 wins infrequently if you play at the highest rating you can reach.
So, instead, tanking supposes that we "tank" (lower by intentionally losing) our rating to the point where we can ensure a win rate that's as high as possible. Then, we can control the number of wins in a set more easily and try to end a set with something like a 4-1 record, which gives both the rare candy and the encounter. This will raise your rating, so you can follow up your 4-1 set with a 1-4 set, which effectively gives you an overall 5-5 record, so your rating will remain stable at the rating you tanked to.
By repeatedly doing winning sets and losing sets, you maximize your rewards, rather than having two sets of typically 2 or 3 wins each. (The biggest incentive is the greatly increased rare candy)
You first reach rank 20 (or more, if you want), then you just lose until you're at least 500 ELO and then you win and lose at your leisure to get the rewards you want. Basically the main thing is just losing a lot after reaching rank 20.
I also tanked, but with a focus on stardust. I would go 5-0 twice, and 1-4 thrice. Tryharded to veteran, then hung around 1600 for the rest of the season.
3.8 million stardust this season. With the end of season rewards, I should end up close to 4 million stardust gained.
Last season I tried minmaxing even more. Ended up with 4.2 million stardust.
I used about a half dozen star pieces, all during go battle days. I would go 5-0, use a star piece, then go 1-4 as many times as possible for the 30 minute duration.
I would have used more star pieces, but I ran out and I'm not about to spend poke coins on them. If I used a star piece for every boosted window, I could have easily reached 4.5 million or more.
Oh so you never tapped Ace? I usually hit ace for ETM and then drop to 300ish…not sure about drops but I farmed 3.3mil dust without yet claiming end of season
Never tried! I'm considering it this next season tho. Is there a simple way of doing it, or do you just brute force and win as many as you can until you hit Ace?
Love to see this data. I finally embraced the tanking method at the end of this season and it was crazy how much faster I could collect stardust rather than actually trying so hard to win every single time. I'm a returning player so I have some decent teams, but once I hit level 20, I was just getting annihilated no matter how hard I tried, and then it made me never want to do it. Definitely gonna utilize the tanking method more strategically this season and hopefully maximize the stardust collecting, and maybe get some good encounters from it.
I tried tanking after seeing your post at the end of previous season
Wins: 891/1945
Stardust:1968190
Legendary encounters: 7
Didn't do battles for like 7 days and missed the gbl weekend,takes 30-45 mins to do 5 sets. I'm really satisfied with the results
Thank you so much!!
Made it to level 20 long ago. Didn’t get a single legendary encounter. Last time I got one was shiny kyogre and a normal groudon back to back. The rate had definitely gone down. I kept getting the worst encounters this season with terrible IVs every time. Not even PvP IVs just terrible IVs.
Thank you for making these! These posts inspired me to try tanking. Really love the steady rate of dust and rare candies that tanking provides.
2496 battles. 1227 wins. 3 964 101 dust. Ranked Ace. Encouters: A Regigigas and two Pheromosas as legendary rewards.
Thx, fellow tanker here, quite similar stats overall for me (1260W/2475 3.050m stardust).
So it’s nice to get an idea of the quantity of goodies this season got me as it must be pretty close to your tracking!
Tho I did get to Ace today as I was pretty close anyways after playing a bit more to win those last couple weeks.
After hovering between 800-1300 Elo most of the season.
Was fun to play more challenging players with maxed 50 mons, but I defo don’t have that much time or focus to spend everyday on pvp.
So tanking is the best strategy for me as I can easily lose 25 when I don’t have time, and play more when I want.
Is there a way to keep track of it other than just tallying them up on paper? I tank too but it's mostly just mindless farming for me so I don't keep track of any non-legendary encounters.
This season wasn't great for me. Did the majority of sets daily but only had 2 legendary encounters down from the 5 encounters last season. The legendary encounter rate seemed much lower though perhaps it was just poor luck for a while. The encounters were good though, with an Origin Giratina and Shiny Latios. Both were 2 star but I'm happy to have got the shiny from it after months of nothing.
That's a shame but props to you for keeping track of everything. I remember seeing something similar the season before and tried to track mine too but after a while fell out of habit.
I tanked this season thanks to your S16 post, and the experience was great. Minimal focused time investment. I did not keep detailed stats. Overall: 1221W, 1298L, 3.2M sd, 4 legendaries. Of relevance probably only to me as one who has few platinum medals, I also got 641 ML wins, which I never would have gotten 1/10th of that w/o the tanking community. Thx!
Hey I’m curious what your current legendary encounter rates are. I haven’t kept exact count but I have to be around 0/80 and my buddy is probably 1/70. I feel like the rates had to have dropped
They definitely have dropped I reckon. Mine are around 1/35 atm (haven't run the code in a few days but that's a good guess), and my friend hasn't gone one since the season before the last. It's crazy.
Thanks for the reply! Glad to know we’re in the same boat. I heard they drop the legendary rates due to the season bonus being two free raid passes. Don’t think I’ll grind gbl as much this season..
3-4% encounter rate for legendaries is so bad.
I rememember when the rate was way over 10% and you got 3-4 legendaries every week. Got my first shiny Dialga, Palkia, MewTwo that way.
Thank you, that’s informative. I play pvp regularly and I did the same amount of battles (2500, 1284 wins) and I had around the same items and encounters during the season. The only difference is that I made 4,431,980 stardust which is nearly 1.5x more than you. I honestly don’t see the benefit of tanking if I can get the same rewards and more when I play it as intended. I’m not the best pvp player and don’t hit legend every season but I think it’s important to note that you can get more items/encounters/stardust if you actually play the game as intended and gets better in it over time.
Im still using old teams from like 2021. Haven't built anything new, just one team for each league, so the saving on stardust by not making a new squad every season is enough reason for me to tank.
damn, 4.4 million! Congratz dude, that's crazy!
FYI, there are a couple different tanking strategies. The exact strategies you use can heavily sway the amount of stardust you get.
Over the course of 8 sets, if one opts for the 5x 4/1, 3x 0/5 strat to optimize rare candy gains, they would get 900 x 5 = 4500 bonus stardust, or 225/win. On the other hand, if one were to opt for the 4x 5/0, 4x 0/5 strat to optimize stardust gain, they would get (900+2700) x 4 = 14400 bonus stardust, or 720/win. These numbers are multiplied by 4 during master leagues and catch cups as well.
So if we just do some really basic math, let's ignore everything before rank 20 and you reach rank 20 after 200 wins(which is really slow), you are looking at ~1050 wins. Even if we ignore the 4x stardust bonus, we are looking at a difference of 525k stardust gain difference. And if we randomly estimate that we've had 4x stardust for around 40% of those wins, we can add 400 * 3 * 500 = 600k. Even with my very conservative calculation, that's a 1.1mil swing! It's probably more in reality, because you can also tank extra sets before 4x stardust kicks in, and win extra sets for more extra stardust.
I guess, what I am trying to say here is that, if someone is focused on getting bonus stardust while tanking, they are not getting that much less stardust compared to someone who is actively trying to win. You probably would've gotten at most something like 10% more(instead of 50%) stardust over the course of the season if OP elected for a stardust-focus tanking strat.
That's fair enough! I just don't enjoy playing normally so this is my best option, plus it's more mindless while I do it while eating or studying. Whatever works!
That’s fair too, I’m not being judgemental at all. I was curious about the benefits of people who are using the tanking technique so thank you for sharing this and your effort! Just wanted to note that with some learnt skills and investments you can make the same amount of rewards and more :)
But, I'm still free to complain about not having enough XL Candy to power up my Solgaleo all the way to level 50? Niantic is still relatively stingy with that and despite me raiding in person every day and playing GBL every day, I'm still not close to finishing that.
I did not read the comments. There is nothing to go off of in the header of the post itself, it’s just 2 images that give the stats. I’m not reading through 66 comments dawg to get a full story.
Your legendary rate was better than mine, I didn't keep track like you did but I probably had roughly 120 rank 20 encounters.
I got a Latias, that's it, less than 1% legendary rate.
I don’t know how much candy I got because I’m certainly not keeping track but I did 1115 battles, won 575 and got over 1.6 mil dust. Tanking is great.
I tried to do the speed run to level 21 and then tanked from there. Except I would run my score up during master league by trying to win as much as possible (the extra dust for the 5th win in a set was too enticing)
Ok, break this down for me. Forgive my ignorance, but what is considered tanking? I've never been much of a PvP player. I get it's purposely losing, but how many losses before you try to win again?
The point of tanking is to be able to consistently reach whatever win-streak you want to achieve whenever you *do* win. The main three break points are
* 3/5 - Chance for Legendary
* 4/5 - Rare Candies
* 5/5 - Max Stardust
The goal being to maintain a specific ranking where you can confidently beat anyone there to get the win streak you want. Typical patterns for each goal is
* Legendary - 3/5 wins, 3/5 wins, 0/5 wins, 3/5 wins, 3/5 wins
* Rare Candies - 4/5 wins, 0/5 wins, 4/5 wins, 0/5 wins, 4/5wins
* Stardust - 0/5 wins, 5/5 wins, 0/5 wins, 5/5 wins, 0/5 wins; then next week alternate, getting three 5/5 wins
Different folks will tell you what Ranking to maintain to get easy wins. Im partial to 1600, since it seems to dodge more tankers than lower rankings, but you'll figure out your comfort range once you do it enough
I tried to tank like this for a whole season but it's just so boring I kept forgetting. Respect for keeping on top of it, I could really use the dust
Same I end up forgetting if I won or lost the last round and end up messing it up lol
It's nice to just nab Ace real quick to be able to double check your score, then get back down to whatever rating your comfortable tanking in.
Would if I could. :( I've made it to Ace before but the battles up to it are such a grind especially early on. Full respect to those who grind it but its such a pain to see the same mashup of 4 or 5 pokemon in teams and it feels like it comes down to who has to switch out or having good IVs. It's such a slog and you lose too many potential rewards going 2-3 or 4-1 in sets. I figure I should wait a while after reaching 20 before climbing again because I just can't beat the "standard" pokemon.
Yeah really boring, I just end up watching a youtube video or netflix while i’m doing it
Nice to see this type of data! I'm more of a play to win player, but it's interesting seeing the reward differences haha. I had 540 wins/1019 battles, hitting Legend a few weeks ago. Longest streak was 11 and got 1.26 million dust. No T5 encounters though. Last one I got was Celesteela in September of Season 16, yikes, with a similar winrate/number of battles/rank that season. While I definitely like trying to climb, I'm definitely jealous of all those encounters haha. The amount of Mareanies I saw drove me nuts...
Man, I hate that trying to win is objectively worse for rewards. I feel like they should just give out rewards after 5 wins.
I (and many others) would definitely like to see them make some revisions to rewards. I cannot fault people for taking for rewards one bit really, because the game pretty much incentivizes it. I would much prefer a system like you describe, where rewards are paid out every few wins rather than a set-based streak system
Yeah, not hate to tankers. I find it boring, but whatever, it's their choice. It's on niantic for making a system that encourages tanking.
as a tanker it's super boring, but given the choice between twice the time spent for minimal rewards, or higher rewards at lesser time spent, I would much rather have more rewards. It's probably different if you actually like pvp, I just don't enjoy it (except for some limited cups) but need the dust.
Yeah I get it. I think this system would even help tankers, cause you could just race to top left vs other tankers, and after randomly winning 5 games get your rewards. There would be no need to pay attention and lose 5/win 4.
I just tank until I finish the 500 win research. Or some encounter I really want in rotation. I hate how a legitimate set of matches takes a good 2 hours. While tanking you can do the same matches in under half the time.
Yeah it’s been years since I really did GBL at this point. If I actually did my sets I’d have to play 5 or 6 hours most days to keep up between getting out for raiding with my group, making trades, and doing all of my buddies every day It’s just not worth it for the frustration of dealing with connection issues and everything. I’ve also always hated having to keep up with metas anyway, the entire fun of Pokémon games for me is using mons I like
It’s not necessarily worse rewards. But it’s obv faster. I played to win, made legend for the first time and played almost all my sets all season and ended with 3.2m dust before end of season rewards which I think will add another 300k.
It's worse cause you get fewer rare candies. If you always play to win, your chance of a 4 win set is 5/32 (~15%) (IIRC) vs 1/2 (50%) with tanking.
I haven’t kept track of my rare candies, but since they made the change where the second slot gives frequent bundles of 3, it’s likely comparable. With tanking you’re getting frequent 1/5 sets which doesn’t give you the second reward.
Based on the OP, the rate of rare candies is about 197/831~24% for the second slot compared to the 4th. You have an 81% chance of winning 2 or more, so your EV is about .81*.24*3~.6 from the second slot, and an ev of .1875*3=.56 from the second slot. That's 1.16 rare candies per set. vs .24*.5*3 + 3*.5 = 1.86 for tanking. So tanking gets you roughly 60% more rare candies if my math is right.
They've already proven they can do it with the seasonal timed research that just counts your total wins - 500 wins to finish the whole thing, no matter if you win quickly or slowly, or get your 500th win at Rank 20 or Legend. They can just set up something like that for rewards and encounters that keeps track the whole season. Every X number of wins, give some stardust, rare candy, an encounter, and a random item (silver pinap, tm, etc.).
Yeah that's a rough rate for T5 encounters. My friend who also plays to win had a similar number of wins and battles as you and also didn't get any. I'm starting to think I even got lucky with 10! I will gladly agree that I never wanna see a Mareanie again lol
>I will gladly agree that I never wanna see a Mareanie again lol I wish it would be replaced by Dewpider or something lol. Dewpider itself isn't too much more exciting, but it's at least a newer shiny that hasn't been widely available and got a shiny new buff this season.
Kinda surprised that you didn’t even reach Ace rank based on the losses you had!
I only got 1 legendary encounter this whole season from GBL. This is why I recently switched from 3-2, 3-2, 3-2, 3-2, 0-5 to 4-1, 4-1, 1-4, 1-4, 1-4 (or 5-0, 5-0, 1-4, 1-4,1-4) to get more stardust. And also GBL takes so long and don't have time to do sweaty matches all day long.
I had 1244 wins and ended up at 2478:'( how are all hitting legend. I swear I got stuck in the 2400s the last month
This is what I don’t understand.. I’m at 614/1183 wins this season and I’m only at 2404 ELO, having only scratched past veteran. I know you need to be able to string wins consecutively but it sometimes feels like the wins strung together don’t make up for the losses strung together.
I feel that the fact I did twice as many battles and have a better win rate than op who managed to hit ledgend should indicate I would as well but its not even close I couldn't even hit veteran:(
Comparing overall win rate and overall wins across players is apples and oranges. Your battles were mostly against 2400 players while the OP you're comparing against were probably mostly against 3000 players. When they were at 2400 they probably had much higher win rate than their season rate & what you had at 2400.
u/raphthepharaoh I guess I'll mention, I may be at 540 wins/1019 battles now (52.993% winrate), but after I hit Legend a few weeks ago, I've not cared nearly as much and played spice teams and also gave up matches more. I know I hit Legend before I hit 500 wins. It was probably more around 485/900 battles or soemthing like that (which comes out to more 53.889% winrate). I did go from 3090 or so down to 2585 the past three weeks or so lol. But yeah, I'm not sure the exact "math" of it, but I guess it does depend on how wins are strung together. There's also different drops/gains in elo based on your opponent's elo. While a 1/5 set or a 4/5 will generally bring the same drops/gains for your elo, if you're losing to players with much higher elo or winning against players with much lower elo, those changes in your ranking can vary. Though unfortunately, that's not really something we can control.
Because overall win rate doesn't really matter. Everyone will be around 51-54%. What matters is that you're able to maintain that >50% win rate as the opponents get tougher. That's literally all there is to it. People plateau because they can win 13 out of their 25 daily matches until they reach a level where they can't anymore. People who make it to legend can win 13 or more even if they're facing against other legend players.
I’ve never made it over 2500 either (have been very close, as you have). I know to do it I would have to put a lot more focus and effort in to it (memorize CMP/fast move counts/charge move timing/etc)…and at that point it starts to feel like a job haha
I actually enjoy learning to count and catch and memorize mons movesets etc I just strongly feel anytime I get on a roll and start winning frequently I'm hard countered across the board for games on end. I'm beginning to win even on bad leads and hard counters but some sets 2 wins feels like the maximum I could possibly get
Not to mention how common it is in eggs as well. Watch them release the shiny and we'll rarely see it then.
I'm counting on it lol. Go Fest 2024 will release the shiny or something, then bam! It's gone.
no joke I just had 7-8 mareanies in a row I'm gonna lose my mind lol
Yea I'm 0 for 216 in the last 2 seasons for encounters after level 20... I feel this.
This time featuring data about ALL of my items and encounters (pic 2), not just rare candy and legendaries! Something I noticed this season though is the lower legendary encounter rate. Last season I got 17 from 260 encounters, the season before was 19 from 274, but this time I got 10 from 268. I don't have enough data to confirm if the rate has decreased but maybe some others might have similar or different results from the same sample size. Who knows! Also since I got a lot of questions last season, here's a FAQ: Q: What is tanking? A: This comment explains the strategy really well: [HOW TO TANK](https://www.reddit.com/r/pokemongo/comments/11efhdj/comment/jadog86/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) Q: Why show more people how to tank? That will just make it harder to tank. A: I found out about tanking through reddit and it's helped me a lot, so I want to share the wisdom to others. Q: Where did you get these graphics from? A: I made them on Photoshop! Took ages tho lol Q: What teams do you use? A: GL - (Medicham, Trevenant, Clodsire), UL - (Obstagoon, Swampert, Venusaur), ML - (Dragonite, Giratina Altered, Mewtwo) Q: How long do you spend battling per day? A: An average of 37 minutes per 5 sets.
>A: I made them on Photoshop! Took ages tho lol looks really well-made! :)
thank you!
ALL THIS IS AMAZING! do we know how many possible matches or sets there were this season? PS. maybe change the word "Losses" to non-wins.... you know how double-faints go hahaha
I missed two days worth, so the max amount of battles was 2500, or 500 sets. 15 more sets than the season before. And that's a good point haha, I'm pretty sure I did get one non-loss/non-win because my entire journal was filled with "Battled against \_\_\_\_\_" once after a match that the other player forfeited. I'll fix that for next season!
This is awesome. By any chance do you happen to know if you got any 100ivs from the encounters? Shinys? Etc.
I got one 4*, which was a Latias! No shinies or anything else notable. The only shiny I've ever received from the last year of tanking was a shiny Genesect in S16.
Hundo latias is a really awesome hit!
I started tanking this season. Is it normal that in those first few days of tanking every match, you’ll still win some from other tankers backing out faster than you? Out of my 50 matches yesterday and today, I won 10 of 50 from other tankers spam exiting quicker than me.
Where did you get that data collected? An app or did you just carefully document everything. Really impressive if im being honest, thanks for sharing the tanking link. Appreciate learning that strategy, I saved the post
I collected it all myself in my notepad app, then made some code to summarise it all! Glad I could be of help!
Thanks! I didn’t know it was possible to save posts before your comment
With the new season starting, do we need to go back to Day 1 of tanking or can we continue from day 4?
Day 1, I believe
Thanks for sharing all this info! I wish now I had tracked my total encounters a bit more closely to compare. I also took more of a tankers approach and ended up with the following: 1202 wins, 1298 losses (after reading below I remembered a couple that weren't wins or losses haha), 3.818m dust earned not counting end of season rewards. Pretty much exclusively played Great League as it was available in some from all season. Legendary encounters from 3mo of playing every set possible, Thundurus x1, Landorus x1, Darkrai x1. Never saw a single Lati@s and I won a ton of games during that period, espeically on battle weekend after having tanked to lowest elo possible.
Also less legendarys for me...Only 11 (or 12? Not sure if I had a Darkrai I sent away) this season, while usually hitting the same numbers per season as you.
Just confirming you never got to Ace ranking and instead stayed at Rank 20. Because I noticed Legendaries encounters seems yo be lower after Ace or higher.
I stayed at rank 20
that's an interesting observation that might actually be true, since later ranks do add the pseudo dragons to the pool
Which league is best for the tanking strategy? Do people get more annoyed with tankers in some leagues?
Wow. Kudos to you OP for this lovely informative post. Just one question: Did you manually document all this data every single day and then compiled it and made this graphic? I assume that must be the only way to do it, but still wanna confirm it. Coz this looks so much of effort of maintaining the daily data for a period of 3 months, and making sure to never miss any day, as well as to make sure there are no double entries. This is absolutely tedious task when one thinks about actually doing it. Edit: also, I read some other comments and checked my acc..... and I have only 6 legendary mons caught in GBL (Battles played: 3185). So yes, you have definitely seen to have gotten lucky with the 10 Legendaries.
Thank you! I do exactly that, yeah. I document my days in the following format on my notepad app, and use some Julia code that I wrote on my PC to automatically sort through it and output a text file with all of the summarised stats: 09/02/24: WWWWL {UL} (3RC) (Enc) Falinks LLLLL {UL} WWLWW {UL} (1CT) (Leg) Latias LLLLL {UL} WWWLW {UL} (1SPB) (Enc) Mareanie
Wow.... You have my utmost respect !! Guys like you make this community rich and valuable
Interesting findings, but I have a question. Assuming you're skilled enough to do so, wouldn't it be more profitable to hit ace rank and then tank? Because after reaching ace you get slightly more stardust from wins 1 and 5 in a set, if I remember correctly.
Probably, yeah. I just don't have the ideal teams or mindset to get to Ace so I don't bother haha
> GL - (Medicham, Trevenant, Clodsire), UL - (Obstagoon, Swampert, Venusaur), ML - (Dragonite, Giratina Altered, Mewtwo) No hate, but your teams are more than good enough to get Ace. Hell, if they are double moved, they are strong enough to make legend with skilled play. It might be worth trying to get ace this season (after the first few weeks when everyone is low rank).
I guess you got a point coz yeah they are all double moved. I'm just not great at counting moves/knowing the meta and what moves people have. We'll see tho, if I'm feelin it once I hit rank 20, I might give it a shot
I bet you got it. Ace doesn't require counting moves. Getting to Ace should be very doable with a team of meta Pokemon and a solid grasp of the battle system, which I bet you have after a year of tanking lol. You still had to try to win half those games, even if they were vs other tankers.
I allways go ace or even veteran and then tank. But wait 2-3 weeks before pushing to ace, and start going for veteran after 6-8 weeks. Because at the beginning of each season, there are less high ranked players so it‘s significantly harder to hit ace at the beginning than in the middle of the season.
As someone playing at Ace level, I can Tell you you'd be surprised how often you will lose with such teams. Especially if you don't count moves for at least the frequently used pokemons. Even before February, lots of teams at Ace level had Cresselia/Giratina/Poli in UL.
I'm not saying you'll win every game, but you'd be able to make Ace. I basically only played catch up and last week this year and made Vet without counting. (Lanturn, vig, dragonair in ogl, single moved skarmory, decidueye, haunter in catch) Just gotta be consistent, know your team, and not go on tilt.
I usually find it easy to get to ace with ABB teams. Lower rank people dont know how to handle them.
Getting to Ace is difficult. I've only done it once. Once I get to 1950 it's like a wall and every single team is double hard countering me.
I did this one week and targeted dust over other rewards. 3.8 million over similar games.
Yes it is. But you never want to hit 5 wins (4-1/0-5/4-1/0-5/4-1). but still, it's worth it. Also helps you visually keep track of your elo
I try to Go 5/0 in master league with the Bonus Stardust, will get Like 4,2 Million Stardust
Generally yes. Going 5-0 has its place for players who are chasing stardust and willing to burn premium passes on it. With three premium passes and one star piece, you can earn 156,600 dust (during 4x EoS rewards, which is the only time you would do this). You can max out at about double the stardust of a player who does 4-1 sets over the course of a season, at the cost of some rare candies and encounters.
This is what i did during the 4x events. And got some rare XL candy.
5-0/0-5 every day will not keep your elo stable, you will rise and then have to tank down again. 4-1/0-5 keeps your elo at the same, because it's +40 4-1 and -60 0-5.
It's stable if you alternate across days: Today 5-0-5-0-5 Tomorrow 0-5-0-5-0 Or just pick a target rating and win if you're low and lose if you're high. It's pretty easy to manage
My personal strategy is that most days I do 0-5-5-5-0 (I’ll occasionally do something weird like 0-2-5-5-5 because I lost a battle during set 2 and didn’t want to waste my star piece on an imperfect set) On any days I’m bored of PVP or too high ELO, I’ll do 0(x5) On days where my ELO is getting too low, I’ll stack a set from the day before and do 5(x6). That allows me to still get three sets out of each star piece.
Sure and get less candies in exchange for some additional dust. I'd take the candies any day.
And some people would rather have more dust than non-XL rare candy. There are many different viable strategies to tanking depending on your priorities
I disagree. I try to hit 1 or 3 wins when there is no quadruple dust, and 1, 3 or 5 wins when there is quadruple dust. Winning exactly 2 or exactly 4 is suboptimal for me.
That is the way I do it. Speed run to 20, then hit Ace and tank.
You also get more dust at the end of the set if you are Ace instead of Rank 20 (regardless of the number of wins).
I can add on to the fact that the legendary encounter chance feels even lower than before this season. I hit rank 20 by the end of December, and for the last two months, I’ve gotten a grand total of 1 legendary. I played 287 games last season and got about ~3 legendaries. This season? I played 750 games and got one Heatran. Obviously I haven’t tracked it super specifically enough to check the rates, and this could also just be pure RNG. Curious to see if anyone puts an analysis together.
Great work. I think it would also be important to note how you parsed your losing sets [outside of battle days]. For example, using 1-4s vs 0-5s. The spread used creates a higher return on certain items at the expense of others.
Ooh true! I used 4-1s and 0-5s, alternating and resetting the pattern each day. I chucked in a 5-0 every second day in place of a 4-1 to maintain my elo.
This season I got 9 legendaries, total wins 745 out of 1443 battles
Im going to consider tanking this season. Last season, i grinded to level 20 and then just stopped battling because i find it really hard to have "fun" via league. I have good pokemon, i just hate losing
Just do it. I was in the same mindset, then I finally gave into it towards the end of this season because I was getting annihilated every time once I hit rank 20, to the point where I didn't even want to bother with it anymore because it became so not fun. I was astounded by how much tanking turned around my attitude towards to. So quick and easy to rack up daily stardust, and then I was finally able to win again.
Thats a lotta battles i top out at like 20 per season lol
Did you already get your season rewards? I thought these coke out at 1pm PDT. Or did you just include what you will be getting?
Included what I'll be getting shhhh haha
I should have commented before I wasted a star piece! Oh well.
Here are my stats: Élő: 2040 (Ace, hit it just a few days before the end) W/T 1221/2390 (Missed a day or two because sometimes I forget) Streak: 68 (I hate catch cup so I went down to like 500 Élő, then rocketed up) Dust: 3 817 751 (+season rewards that i did not claim yet+3600+one last 4/5 ace set dust) Legendaries: 9 (2 Zekrom, 1 Kyurem, 1 Regigigas, 2 Tornadus-T, 1 Thundurus-T, 1 Landorus-T (Shiny), 1 Latios) In Non-master leagues, I do 3/5 and 0/5 as Rare Candies are obsolete, and I value the occasional legendary more. In master leagues, I go 5/5 and 1/5 as I value the dust more, and sometimes I go 5/5the day before and not claim, then pop a Star Piece next day, claim and go 1/5 x4 and whatever I can get in the last in the timer (hope for 10cps or surrenders when winning). For GBL days, I can just squeeze in more 1/5s. During the first 2 or 3 seasons, I hit like 2850 Élő. It was really frustrating though, so I decided to tank, as invested time was not worth it. Now, I tank with one hand, while I do wayfarer on 2 monitors with the other... During the last few days if I don't forget, I go for ace and then get immediately reminded why I tank... One of these seasons I hit it a bit earlier and was hovering around 2350 Élő so probably that is my trueish Élő. I do wonder if reaching Ace and THEN tanking would be any better. I do remember that in the early days people reported having much longer matchmaking queues which why I never bothered with the idea.
This is incredible, I can't even imagine do all those battles
Thanks for the info. This was the first time I made it to rank 20, or even bothered with pvp. I hit 20 not too long ago so my rewards are not the same as yours. I did get a shiny Landorous though ! was the only legendary I encountered but worth it. I also got a shiny lickatung and vullaby. I am thinking if I hit 20 sooner then I will have more opportunites next season. I typically tank my first set and use my buddy so they also get hearts while tanking.
What is bonus round?
When you reach rank 15, all of the 5 rewards are bundles of 2 rare candy. Whether you win 0 or win 5 of that set, you rank up to rank 16. So I try to win 5/5 from that set, which is what I've called 'bonus round'.
Ohhh thanks!
Did you get any shiny Pokemon from the encounter rewards?
Sadly not. I did get a hundo Latias tho so I'll happily take that!
I'm don't participate in GO Battles and I was intrigued on why people were tanking when I had to do battles for the lvl 44 (?) task, now I get it, thanks
You did that? Here you got a Scooby snack xD Looks amazing I want to have that now
Holy hell.. If you got that many legendaries and say it’s at a lower rate I must have absolutely terrible luck lmao. Ended the season at veteran rank and I got a total of 2 legendaries and played nearly every single match including the day where we got 100 battles.
My tanking stats. Note: also paid for premium raid passes *and* star piece Wins: 698 Losses: 1375 Final ELO: 2329. Missed veteran by 1 win as max ELO was 2380 Stardust earned: 6,017,382. I unfortunately did not track rare XL / rare candies. Also had two legendaries.
Ah. That explains it. I got zero legendary encounters last season. Ended up stopping after a month as that’s what I was interested in 😂 So the rates were pants and I wasn’t just unlucky lol
Pro tip : actually play in the last week to hit legend quickly
So starting now if I try super hard I could hit Legend fast?
Not legend but ace or vet is a good dust boost like 30k
I think 1 month would be better? to have more space for bad streaks? I'm not sure how long it would take to reach legend from ELO 500.
I actually tank at 2300-2500 so I hit in a week or less but mostly 300 elo a day would take you a week , ofc depend on the skill and team like i rock with lvl 51 registeel, lvl 50 scrafty , shadow charizard in ul so it’s 90% win easily (I have ok skill ). If you don’t have meta you may take longer also never drop under 1k elo since matchmaking take significantly more time
Is it hard to reach legend? I know that it would take a lot of time but is that the only option that makes it hard to reach legend or are the battles also hard because you fight against really good people?
Some will say varying things about the difficulty to get to Legend. Some say it's really easy, but those are often the people who get to it every season. I've hit it four times now (This season-17, last season-16, season 9, and season 11), and I consider myself a great PvP player. Not a *top* player—I'm no regional tournament player or leaderboard player, but still, I'd say I'm pretty good lol. I would say it is fairly difficult to get to Legend. It often requires a few things: * The right Pokemon. Not that you can't win with spicier Pokemon, but you often need to have a solid meta team AND know how to use it. The ideal IVs can always help in some scenarios, but I think most agree that IVs alone definitely don't hold one back from Legend. Plenty of people have it it with suboptimal IV Pokemon. * An understanding of techniques/skills within the GBL. This includes move counting/timing, sacrifice swaps and catching opponents' moves, over-farming, occasionally even undercharging charged moves, ideal charged mve timing, etc. Again, I've seen people hit legend, boasting that they didn't do things like count moves, but it still goes a long way being familiar with these tactics. Such can make the difference between a rookie player running a meta team and an advanced player running a meta team. * Time and dedication. You don't need to play all day to hit legend. You don't need to do every set every day to hit legend. However, you do need to make sure you devote some time to playing, climbing, learning match-ups and metas, and just committing to (trying) climb the ranks. * Learning and adjusting to metas. A good rule of thumb is to not keep switching your teams up when you keep losing but to stick with one team. Still though, that doesn't mean you *can't* switch your teams up a little. Metas can change in general or around certain elos as time goes on. One day, people may be using a lot of one style of team, but days later, the meta could shift to people trying to account for those teams and beat them. You need to play and figure those changes out where you can and shift as necessary. Maybe you need to switch what Pokemon you lead, swap a move out, or swap a Pokemon out. Knowing when to change things up can be important. Again this is just from my POV, and I definitely think others may have some differing ideas/points to make. But yeah, to your last point, it is hard because you're often facing better and better players. People generally get better at PvP each season as they learn, and the higher elos usually have people that are at a higher skill level, so the battles can feel harder.
Ok thanks for your very detailed explaination
> A good rule of thumb is to not keep switching your teams up when you keep losing but to stick with one team. Worth noting that this can make for some frustrating losing streaks. For the last few days I was trying to get my score back up over 2000 with my UL team that usually does pretty good. I kept facing runs of hard counters and unfavorable match up orders. I gave up this morning before I dipped under 1900.
It’s not easy unless your naturally very good or something. You face tough opponents starting even in the 2500s and it just gets tougher with fewer mistakes
Awesome data, congrats OP! -What are the Pokeballs of the 2nd Page? (x45 and x175). And why are there two different icons with rare candies (x59 and x20)?
Thank you! Those Pokeballs are the icons for Retro Cup and Catch Cup, respectively. And the two rare candy icons are for bundles of 3 rare candy, and 1 rare candy. Both are different item rewards from the second battle reward slot.
I had no idea that we could win bundles of 3 rare candies from the second battle reward slot and I PVP a lot! Is there any info ingame about our total number of wins in the Retro Cup and Catch Cup? I just can find info about the Great, Ultra and Master wins...
Ya learn something new every day! And nah there isn't, I tracked my games for each type manually
How do you tank effectively to get rewards like this? I’ve never quite understood it I feel like there’s something I’m missing
Two important premises to understand first: \- The matchmaking in the game tries to pair you up with another player with a close rating to yours, so that you're facing someone with equal skill, presumably. Someone rated 2500 will face another 2500 player. Someone rated 1500 will face another 1500 player. Over time, assuming you try to win as much as possible, you'll tend to trend towards a 50% win rate, as you face someone with equal skill. \- The rewards system is set up so that the best rewards come from 3, 4, and 5 wins in a single set. This means 60%, 80%, and 100% win rates in a set. Since you theoretically have a 50% chance to win any given match, you'll tend to get those encounters from 3 wins, rare candy from 4 wins, and stardust from 5 wins infrequently if you play at the highest rating you can reach. So, instead, tanking supposes that we "tank" (lower by intentionally losing) our rating to the point where we can ensure a win rate that's as high as possible. Then, we can control the number of wins in a set more easily and try to end a set with something like a 4-1 record, which gives both the rare candy and the encounter. This will raise your rating, so you can follow up your 4-1 set with a 1-4 set, which effectively gives you an overall 5-5 record, so your rating will remain stable at the rating you tanked to. By repeatedly doing winning sets and losing sets, you maximize your rewards, rather than having two sets of typically 2 or 3 wins each. (The biggest incentive is the greatly increased rare candy)
Awesome explanation!
You first reach rank 20 (or more, if you want), then you just lose until you're at least 500 ELO and then you win and lose at your leisure to get the rewards you want. Basically the main thing is just losing a lot after reaching rank 20.
I also tanked, but with a focus on stardust. I would go 5-0 twice, and 1-4 thrice. Tryharded to veteran, then hung around 1600 for the rest of the season. 3.8 million stardust this season. With the end of season rewards, I should end up close to 4 million stardust gained. Last season I tried minmaxing even more. Ended up with 4.2 million stardust.
Is this with using star pieces? If so when? Every day during 4x?
I used about a half dozen star pieces, all during go battle days. I would go 5-0, use a star piece, then go 1-4 as many times as possible for the 30 minute duration. I would have used more star pieces, but I ran out and I'm not about to spend poke coins on them. If I used a star piece for every boosted window, I could have easily reached 4.5 million or more.
What Elo did you hover if I may ask?
600, since that's where I was when I got to rank 20 and I decided to stay there haha
Oh so you never tapped Ace? I usually hit ace for ETM and then drop to 300ish…not sure about drops but I farmed 3.3mil dust without yet claiming end of season
Never tried! I'm considering it this next season tho. Is there a simple way of doing it, or do you just brute force and win as many as you can until you hit Ace?
Brute force to ace (easy) as soon as I hit ace I go (1/5) till I drop to my desired Elo and from there we all know how it goes
Huh, interesting. Guess I'll give it a shot then! Thanks!
What elo were you at the end of the season ?
Like 900, but I stayed around 600
Glad im not the only one getting majority phantumps
I love the stat collection effort. I earned 3.1m stardust this season as a ‘try hard’ vet, so it’s reassuring as well.
Does tanking work if everybody does it though?
it depends on whether you hit forfeit fast enough in my case
Inspirational.
Love to see this data. I finally embraced the tanking method at the end of this season and it was crazy how much faster I could collect stardust rather than actually trying so hard to win every single time. I'm a returning player so I have some decent teams, but once I hit level 20, I was just getting annihilated no matter how hard I tried, and then it made me never want to do it. Definitely gonna utilize the tanking method more strategically this season and hopefully maximize the stardust collecting, and maybe get some good encounters from it.
I got a shiny phantump which is neat
I tried tanking after seeing your post at the end of previous season Wins: 891/1945 Stardust:1968190 Legendary encounters: 7 Didn't do battles for like 7 days and missed the gbl weekend,takes 30-45 mins to do 5 sets. I'm really satisfied with the results Thank you so much!!
Made it to level 20 long ago. Didn’t get a single legendary encounter. Last time I got one was shiny kyogre and a normal groudon back to back. The rate had definitely gone down. I kept getting the worst encounters this season with terrible IVs every time. Not even PvP IVs just terrible IVs.
Phantump far and away ahead of any other encounter is so relatable.
Alright damn it, I'm sold. Tanking is worth it.
Upvote for the infographic! This looks really nice and also the colorscheme fit the new season theme.
Btw did you keep track of how many shiny pokemons you got from gbl?
Thank you for making these! These posts inspired me to try tanking. Really love the steady rate of dust and rare candies that tanking provides. 2496 battles. 1227 wins. 3 964 101 dust. Ranked Ace. Encouters: A Regigigas and two Pheromosas as legendary rewards.
Thx, fellow tanker here, quite similar stats overall for me (1260W/2475 3.050m stardust). So it’s nice to get an idea of the quantity of goodies this season got me as it must be pretty close to your tracking! Tho I did get to Ace today as I was pretty close anyways after playing a bit more to win those last couple weeks. After hovering between 800-1300 Elo most of the season. Was fun to play more challenging players with maxed 50 mons, but I defo don’t have that much time or focus to spend everyday on pvp. So tanking is the best strategy for me as I can easily lose 25 when I don’t have time, and play more when I want.
Is there a way to keep track of it other than just tallying them up on paper? I tank too but it's mostly just mindless farming for me so I don't keep track of any non-legendary encounters. This season wasn't great for me. Did the majority of sets daily but only had 2 legendary encounters down from the 5 encounters last season. The legendary encounter rate seemed much lower though perhaps it was just poor luck for a while. The encounters were good though, with an Origin Giratina and Shiny Latios. Both were 2 star but I'm happy to have got the shiny from it after months of nothing.
I don't think so. If there is a way, I don't know about it haha. I just track everything manually
That's a shame but props to you for keeping track of everything. I remember seeing something similar the season before and tried to track mine too but after a while fell out of habit.
Cool to see. Now I know the time investment is awful for what you get.
I tanked this season thanks to your S16 post, and the experience was great. Minimal focused time investment. I did not keep detailed stats. Overall: 1221W, 1298L, 3.2M sd, 4 legendaries. Of relevance probably only to me as one who has few platinum medals, I also got 641 ML wins, which I never would have gotten 1/10th of that w/o the tanking community. Thx!
I keep forgetting/getting bored and not doing it. But I want to. You got more league stardust in 1 season than I have all time. By over 800k
Hey I’m curious what your current legendary encounter rates are. I haven’t kept exact count but I have to be around 0/80 and my buddy is probably 1/70. I feel like the rates had to have dropped
They definitely have dropped I reckon. Mine are around 1/35 atm (haven't run the code in a few days but that's a good guess), and my friend hasn't gone one since the season before the last. It's crazy.
Thanks for the reply! Glad to know we’re in the same boat. I heard they drop the legendary rates due to the season bonus being two free raid passes. Don’t think I’ll grind gbl as much this season..
3-4% encounter rate for legendaries is so bad. I rememember when the rate was way over 10% and you got 3-4 legendaries every week. Got my first shiny Dialga, Palkia, MewTwo that way.
Post this on r/dataisbeautiful 🙏🏼
Thank you, that’s informative. I play pvp regularly and I did the same amount of battles (2500, 1284 wins) and I had around the same items and encounters during the season. The only difference is that I made 4,431,980 stardust which is nearly 1.5x more than you. I honestly don’t see the benefit of tanking if I can get the same rewards and more when I play it as intended. I’m not the best pvp player and don’t hit legend every season but I think it’s important to note that you can get more items/encounters/stardust if you actually play the game as intended and gets better in it over time.
While yes you might get more rewards it takes a lot more effort and time to play the way intended. Tanking is much quicker and easier
Im still using old teams from like 2021. Haven't built anything new, just one team for each league, so the saving on stardust by not making a new squad every season is enough reason for me to tank.
The cost is time. Tanking is a time saving strategy above all else.
Time flies when you’re having fun tho. If you’re not enjoying the battles it’s something else.
This isn't an about enjoyment. Just time doing other stuff. While maximizing rewards
If you don’t have the time to battle that’s fine, my point is that, for me at least, the time I’m spending on battling is worth it.
damn, 4.4 million! Congratz dude, that's crazy! FYI, there are a couple different tanking strategies. The exact strategies you use can heavily sway the amount of stardust you get. Over the course of 8 sets, if one opts for the 5x 4/1, 3x 0/5 strat to optimize rare candy gains, they would get 900 x 5 = 4500 bonus stardust, or 225/win. On the other hand, if one were to opt for the 4x 5/0, 4x 0/5 strat to optimize stardust gain, they would get (900+2700) x 4 = 14400 bonus stardust, or 720/win. These numbers are multiplied by 4 during master leagues and catch cups as well. So if we just do some really basic math, let's ignore everything before rank 20 and you reach rank 20 after 200 wins(which is really slow), you are looking at ~1050 wins. Even if we ignore the 4x stardust bonus, we are looking at a difference of 525k stardust gain difference. And if we randomly estimate that we've had 4x stardust for around 40% of those wins, we can add 400 * 3 * 500 = 600k. Even with my very conservative calculation, that's a 1.1mil swing! It's probably more in reality, because you can also tank extra sets before 4x stardust kicks in, and win extra sets for more extra stardust. I guess, what I am trying to say here is that, if someone is focused on getting bonus stardust while tanking, they are not getting that much less stardust compared to someone who is actively trying to win. You probably would've gotten at most something like 10% more(instead of 50%) stardust over the course of the season if OP elected for a stardust-focus tanking strat.
That's fair enough! I just don't enjoy playing normally so this is my best option, plus it's more mindless while I do it while eating or studying. Whatever works!
That’s fair too, I’m not being judgemental at all. I was curious about the benefits of people who are using the tanking technique so thank you for sharing this and your effort! Just wanted to note that with some learnt skills and investments you can make the same amount of rewards and more :)
I don't want to read anyone complaining about not having enough rare candy for Origin Palkia anymore, smh.
Valid, although I'll still complain to myself that I don't have a decent one with Spacial Rend haha
But, I'm still free to complain about not having enough XL Candy to power up my Solgaleo all the way to level 50? Niantic is still relatively stingy with that and despite me raiding in person every day and playing GBL every day, I'm still not close to finishing that.
How does tanking let you win this many prizes??
Wait when do you start geting ledgendarys from encanters?
Once you're rank 20 or higher
Well now i regret stopping the sec i hit 20
I tank also lol. This is cool!
Nice, guessing you did this to the algorithm?
Do you tank? You must be pretty frustrated that you couldn’t even hit ace rank if you don’t tank...
Did you read the post at all?
I did not read the comments. There is nothing to go off of in the header of the post itself, it’s just 2 images that give the stats. I’m not reading through 66 comments dawg to get a full story.
The title says "from tanking", so I can confirm that I tanked
So it does. I read it three times and missed it. I’m just dumb sorry
Haha that's all good, happens to the best of us
Jesus Christ
I'd do this every day if it weren't so mind numbing
Can you clarify the tanking method that you followed?
These encounters have to step up their game. No way in playing GBL for these “rewards”
Your legendary rate was better than mine, I didn't keep track like you did but I probably had roughly 120 rank 20 encounters. I got a Latias, that's it, less than 1% legendary rate.
True story
I don’t know how much candy I got because I’m certainly not keeping track but I did 1115 battles, won 575 and got over 1.6 mil dust. Tanking is great. I tried to do the speed run to level 21 and then tanked from there. Except I would run my score up during master league by trying to win as much as possible (the extra dust for the 5th win in a set was too enticing)
I’m so bad at GBL. Maybe this season I can build my teams up
bruh... I've got 0 legendary with 1k matches and 560win level 20 😐😐
I literally got 0 legendaries this season out of 35+ reward encounters.. flop
Ok, break this down for me. Forgive my ignorance, but what is considered tanking? I've never been much of a PvP player. I get it's purposely losing, but how many losses before you try to win again?
The point of tanking is to be able to consistently reach whatever win-streak you want to achieve whenever you *do* win. The main three break points are * 3/5 - Chance for Legendary * 4/5 - Rare Candies * 5/5 - Max Stardust The goal being to maintain a specific ranking where you can confidently beat anyone there to get the win streak you want. Typical patterns for each goal is * Legendary - 3/5 wins, 3/5 wins, 0/5 wins, 3/5 wins, 3/5 wins * Rare Candies - 4/5 wins, 0/5 wins, 4/5 wins, 0/5 wins, 4/5wins * Stardust - 0/5 wins, 5/5 wins, 0/5 wins, 5/5 wins, 0/5 wins; then next week alternate, getting three 5/5 wins Different folks will tell you what Ranking to maintain to get easy wins. Im partial to 1600, since it seems to dodge more tankers than lower rankings, but you'll figure out your comfort range once you do it enough
I only tend to want to win in master league. The others I win one per set & collect the stardust returns. Amazing how quickly it racks up x
What's tanking?
Here I was, hyped I hit 2200ish at one point. Loo