One of Pokemon GO's greatest strengths is how well the developers and community managers listen to the player base are are willing to make constant updates to improve gameplay and user experience. The mobile AR game was slow to update during its first year (and the mobile app was full of bugs), but since then it has come a long way. This is one of the main reasons the game still has such an active community of trainers. Although there have been a few years of gradual improvements, there's always room to continue growing.
The next upcoming batch of Pokemon GO improvements are aimed at making yet another revision to the way the game's combat system works. Combat in Pokemon GO is still pretty much nothing like combat in the core Pokemon franchise of games, but it has improved a lot over the years. Hopefully this next round of revisions will make it even better. Hopefully these improvements will help players deal even more damage with the best new Unova Pokemon in the game.
This isn't a full redo of the combat system so much as a cleanup of a few mechanics that have always seemed a little out of whack. A big improvement will come to the timing for damage dealt and energy charging. This should be a great QOL improvement for players and will help make Raids much less frustrating. Pokemon health bars will also briefly pulse when damage is received to help make it more clear when attacks are landing.
Updates to the combat system
Our team has polished the existing system to make Trainer Battles and Team GO Rocket battles more intuitive and responsive in Pokémon GO version 0.157.0.
The timing for damage dealt and energy charged has been improved. We understand this issue provided a possible knowledge gap that players could learn to work around, giving them an edge in battle. We chose to adjust this since we think it was fundamentally unintuitive that damage and energy changes always ran one move late. Unlike with quickly switching before a predicted Charged Attack, we don’t think the particularities of our refresh rate make for interesting gameplay decisions. A Pokémon’s health bar will briefly pulse when it receives damage.
In addition to the mechanical changes, there are also two new exciting moves being added to the game...
Thunder Fang: An Electric-type Fast Attack - Arcanine, Steelix, Mightyena, Hippowdon
Ice Fang: An Ice-type Fast Attack - Suicune, Mightyena, Mawile, Hippowdon, Drapion
These new moves are very exciting and could help shakeup the Pokemon GO PvE metagame scene. After the number crunchers finish analyzing these new tools, we'll be sure to report back on which attackers come out on top as a result.
Be sure to check back for more Pokemon GO news, updates, and strategy guides in the coming days. Until then, good luck out there, trainers!
Pokemon GO is currently available in select regions on Android and iOS devices.