Five Reasons why you should play Pokemon GO with a friend.

Pokemon GO is supposed to be a friendly little game. The basic idea is that a community comes together to catch Pokemon and have fun. And when Pokemon GO first came out, we all had a lovely summer playing Pokemon together.

Friendship level ups give a lot of experience

Funnily enough, making new friends is actually one of the fastest ways to level up. As you reach different tiers of friendship, you get more and more experience. The higher the rank you reach, the more experience you’ll get. If you reach Best Friends, you get 100,000 experience!

Having a Best Friend has other, extra benefits. Having a friend in the same raid as you will mean that you both do more damage to raid bosses. Speaking of which…

You can do more raids together

The more the merrier, as they say. Although it’s highly dependent on your character level, having a friend playing with you can make the difference between a narrow loss and a narrow win.

Although there are plenty of raids that need more than 2 people, having that extra two, you and your friend, is always handy. After all, the more players you have, the more damage you do.

On quests with different paths, you and a friend can cover both

A while back, Pokemon GO attempted to make split paths for players to follow, based on previous choices. While we haven’t seen the branching quests yet, they will probably come back, most likely for GOFest or a new regional tour. Even if they don’t come back, at least having a friend makes those events more interesting.

Having a friend also means that you have more quest and trade options. The Kanto Fest earlier this year is a good example. We had two branching paths, which conveniently only spawned certain Pokemon on one side. This meant that you had to team up with a friend to trade and fill the whole Pokedex challenge.

Trading unwanted Pokemon for more candy

Personally, this is a big one for me. While trading can be long and tedious, you can get some cool stuff, just from trading alone. Trading a Pokemon gives you a single chance to re-roll a Pokemon’s stats, and you earn one candy for each traded Pokemon. The extra candy is always good, especially on rarer Pokemon, and the further away they are caught, the more candy you get.

Trading with a player also gives you a chance to get Lucky Pokemon. Lucky Pokemon cost less stardust to power up and have a minimum total IVs of 12/12/12. A Pokemon trade becoming lucky is a rare sight, but sometimes you do, well, get lucky. Also, trading with best friends means it’s not just cheaper, but the stats of the Pokemon you trade have a higher chance of being, well, better.

There’s also guaranteed Lucky Trades. These are only available to Best Friends, and are pretty damn rare. The next time you and a Lucky Friend do a trade, your Pokemon will be lucky no matter what.

It’s just nice to share

The best thing about playing Pokemon GO with a friend? Just being friends. It’s always a lot of fun when you bring in more people.

Well, unless you like playing on your own, I guess…