On Already Hitting the Dynamax Endgame

I like Dynamax battles. The tier 1 battles are super fast and free, and, when it comes to solo or low player content, tier 3, 4 and 5 battles are a great challenge. Gigantamax content on the other hand is intentionally tedious, in a bid to draw large crowds. While they can be beaten with low accounts, they require luck and maxed out Pokemon. And premium-only Max Mushrooms. But after a year or so of Dynamax content, the well is basically dry.

But why? There are still unreleased Gigantamax Pokemon and a whole host of Pokemon who could be good for Dynamax. Well, there are several reasons.

The first is the biggest: people don’t want to grind again. Most people already have a good bunch of Pokemon, and they don’t want to invest in more. For tier 1-2 Pokemon, it’s not so bad, because you get a lot more attempts and extra candy if you are looking for, for example, a good Drilbur. But if you want, say, a good Moltres, you have to wait a lot longer, and it takes more effort for one Moltres – a Moltres raid can easily be solo’d but soloing a Moltres Dynamax battle requires a Max Mushroom and 4 people to have Pokemon in the Power Spot already.

On the flip side, owning any Dynamax Pokemon does make it easier to earn candies, but recent changes have massively reduced those gains. After winning a Dynamax battle, you can leave a Pokemon behind to accrue candy if other people do the battle after you. But these days, a Dynamax spot only lasts 24 hours and, apart from Mondays, can only be battled in once. Previously, they would last 2-3 days and had a chance to refresh with a new battle, meaning more people had a chance to use a power spot. These days, there are far, far less power spots, they only last 24 hours and are guaranteed to only refresh on Max Mondays, so you can’t get candies as easily.

Power spots on Max Mondays are more common and are supposed to rotate with new battles every hour, but not all spots rotate and you have the opposite problem – there are now too many power spots, so you can’t guarantee anyone will use the same ones you do. And to make matters worse, some Max Mondays feature tier 5 battles, making it much harder to leave Pokemon unless you coordinate with a team.

The price per battle is also off. You can theoretically do 4 tier 1 raids a day, but the cost for tiers 2-3 are 400 particles and 4-6 cost 800 particles. Yes, you can earn particles for free, but this means no one does the mid-tier battles because they are often either for mediocre Pokemon (Dynamax Wailmer has zero use when Gigantamax Blastoise exists, and Blastoise isn’t even that good) or the Pokemon in question has a Gigantamax out already. A dynamax Machamp is only good if you don’t have a Gigantamax ready, and you can more easily catch wild Machops for candy.

It doesn’t help that the power-up mechanicd are so expensive. You get given a choice: spend a ton of candy and particles to level up a max move, or do more max battles. When it costs 120 candy to power up a max move for a Legendary ONCE, people will just do other things. Especially if they have already spent all their Lugia candy powering up a hundo shadow Lugia.

But I think the bigger problem is that the good, cool, useful stuff has all already been released. We already have the best in slot for almost every type, and Blissey, Gengar, Machamp and the Crowned Doggos cover a huge amount of situations and matchups. There’s very little space to improve, and the only thing Niantic can do is make battles harder, which will just alienate newer players further.

Seriously, if you have the Crowned Doggos, Dynamax Blissey, Metagross, Excadrill and Gigantamax Gengar, Machamp and either the Galar or Kanto starters, once you’ve maxed them out, you need basically nothing else. Theoretically, with enough people, you could just use Blissey, Gengar and the doggos for nearly everything. And, let’s be frank, when Gigantamax battles have up to 100 players, who cares?

To make things exciting, Niantic threw all the good stuff at us straight away, but now long term players have everything and no longer care and new players have no real way to get in and catch up, because repeat events are so rare.