On gym defence, part three, composition of a gym

When populating a gym you're basically faced with one of three situations:

• Drop and walk
• Medium sized raid
• Full raid

Drop and walk

Whenever you're three players or less you can all pop one pokemon into the gym without the need to raise its prestige.

I'm a bit subjective here, but as far as I'm concerned a gym belongs to one of three categories:

• High traffic
• Occasional traffic
• Remote

High traffic

A high traffic gym would be one at, for example, a multi line bus stop, a mall or anywhere else you'd expect a lot of people to pass within gym-combat distance of the gym.

It's going down quick no matter what you do. I suggest this is one of the situations where a dragonite makes perfect sense. It'll come crashing down like a ton of bricks, but it'll inflict quite some damage while doing so.

Occasional traffic

People will pass within fighting distance from the gym several times per hour, but there are also longer periods when no one is there.

Either go for deterrent and place one of the best gym defenders you have,

or

feed the gym with high cp glass cannons (but avoid dragonites). Glass cannons invite team members to add prestige to the gym. Gyarados and Rhydon are perfect. Dragonites are prone to block people from even theoretically being able to top the defenders you've placed, and it's kind of pointless to spend time adding prestige to a gym which you, from a fair distance, can see you'll be unable to avoid the bouncer role.

Observe that vaporeon works both as a deterrent as well as an invitation to increase gym prestige.

Remote

This gym needs you to walk the extra distance to reach. People pass it a few times per day but not much more.

I'd suggest medium capacity deterrent. Say a 2500 snorlax for example. This is where you stove away the highest cp, low IV class A defenders you have. However, avoid chansey.

Up to 20 000 prestige it's perfectly doable to increase prestige to a gym based around medium capacity snorlax and lapras. While not as intimidating as an elite gym, a solo player walking into a level six or seven gym with lapras and snorlax all above 2400 cp is likely to walk away.

Tomorrow we'll take a closer look at the medium sized raid.