7 Tips for Leveling Up Your Buddy in Pokemon GO
Pokemon GO’s buddy system is somewhat weird. Walking a buddy used to just be a way to earn candy. But now, your buddy can earn XL and Mega candt, show you Pokestops you haven’t spun before and gives you presents of varying value. At Best Buddy, your Pokemon gains an extra level, which can take a Pokemon to level 51 at most. However, the buddy system does take a lot of time, especially if you are looking to use a Legendary Pokemon.
Thankfully though, I have some tips for you that can make leveling up a buddy easier.
You don’t Need Poffins
First things first, you don’t actually need Poffins to make your buddy excited. As long as you keep interacting with your buddy every 15-20 minutes, your buddy will slowly become excited. Once your buddy IS excited, the distance needed to get a candy from walking and is halved. But more importantly, you can almost double the number of hearts you can get in a day.
If you are going to use a Poffin though, it’s best to wait until an event where you will be moving around a lot. Walking can give you three hearts, six if it is excited. But not everyone has the time to walk over 6km a day.
Throw your buddy in at the end of a gym battle
The second easiest way to earn hearts is by battling with your buddy. However, this can be rather tedious depending on what your buddy is. Sure, you can always battle Spark, Candela and Icebitch. But if your Pokemon is too high for Great or Ultra League, then fighting against the team leaders is slowed down by their shields. Candela at Master League level is the easiest to fight, since all her Pokemon are weak to Rock. But if you’re in a hurry and don’t have a level 40+ Rampardos, those shields eat into our precious time.
On the flip side, if you stick your Pokemon at the end of a team for fighting gyms, you can actually get your three hearts by defeating 3 Pokemon. You don’t even need to fight the gym again if there’s more than 3 Pokemon in it.
Leave and Rejoin Team Rocket Fights
Funnily enough, you can somewhat cheat the system entirely by simply leaving and rejoining a fight with a Team Rocket Grunt. As long as you hit the Grunt’s Pokemon at least once, you can simply back out and repeat yourself. And since we get 4 Team Rocket balloons a day, this is very easy to do even if you don’t have a Pokestop nearby.
Check your Pokemon’s level if you want to use it in PvP
This is actually quite important, and is something I’ve experienced. For a while, I had a Great-League-ready shiny Lucario, ready to be used for PvP. But I made a mistake by putting it as my buddy. Why? Because, at Best Buddy level, my shiny Lucario’s CP ended up being too high for Great League.
Luckily, we can now preview what a Pokemon’s CP will be when we power it up. You can use this to also check whether a Pokemon will be too high for any league.
Mega-Evolve some Pokemon for Mega Candy
Surprisingly, you can actually get a LOT of Mega Candy by simply walking a Pokemon with a Mega Evolution. You need to have Mega Evolved the species once, but after that one-off Mega, you are guaranteed 15 Mega Candy every time your buddy gets a normal candy.
At the same time, you can also get a lot of XL Candy. This however depends on the level of your Pokemon. The higher the level of your Pokemon, the higher the chance that you get one XL Candy alongside your normal candy.
If you get a walk-for-candy task, take a peek at Buddy History.
The distance one has to walk to receive a candy can be very high. For example, the other day, I got a research task that said “Earn two candies while walking with your buddy.” At the time, I was walking a Giratina and a Palkia, and they both get a candy every 20 kilometers. However, if you browse through your buddy history, the distance walked for a candy is shown on every single Pokemon you’ve used as a buddy. While you do need to use two of your 20 switches, it’s far easier switching to something like Gyarados or Swablu and getting candy that way.
What you can also do is look at how close it is to earning a candy. Last time I did this, I swapped my Legendary buddy for a Growlithe who was at 2.8km out of 3km, and finished the research task with ease.
Pick a medium-sized Pokemon
Having a big buddy is pretty cool, but they do hinder what you can see. Nice, small buddies on the other hand can get lost and, to the untrained eye, look like a normal Pokemon. Sure, your buddy casts a shadow, but at noon, that shadow isn’t always obvious. The best bet is something in the middle, not too big to block your view, but also not small enough to disappear around wild Pokemon.
And there we have it, some tips for making Best Buddies a bit of a smoother ride.