On bubble strat

I've received a number of questions concerning bubble strat.

To begin with, what is bubble strat? It is a method to quickly add prestige to a friendly gym without spending any potions or revives. In an ideal world you should be able to push an empty gym all the way to 50K prestige alone in about twenty minutes.

In a not so ideal world you won't manage to flee from the next battle in time to avoid having your attacker swatted like a fly.


The setup

The link at the top of this post shows a number of attacker-defender pairs. Not all of the 'verified 1000 prestige without taking any damage' work. A hundred revives and twice as many potions can testify to that.

You'll have to find and test what works for you, on your phone and with what you have managed to catch.

Personally I run with abra and krabby as defenders. A Haunter (for the abra) and a gastly for my krabbys make up my attacking team. My abra makes my haunter go splat about one fight out of five. The gastly/krabby combo is 100% barring network lag.

You'll need to check the IV for the small critters you catch. But a simple ruleset is as follows:

Defender

• Poor overall stats, quickly available in-game via the appraise functionality
• The best stat should be attack
• 10 hp
• A primary attack that is slow. Almost always corresponds to high damage output

Attacker

• Lower cp than the defender. If possible half or lower
• As high attack stat as possible without pushing the cp too much

You need one attacker, but you can make good use of multiple defenders

Companions

• Six cp 10 pokemon (five is enough)

How to use bubble strat

The basic usage is to push a gym to either level seven (20K prestige) or level 10 (50K prestige). If you're a group of players together you can stop adding prestige when it's enough to drop pokemon inside to reach your target. Each added pokemon also adds 2000 prestige to the gym.

Drop a bubble defender into the gym. Chose your attacker and fill the remaining five slots with companions to make certain your attacker has the highest cp of your lineup.

The bubble defender (or defenders) will stay at the bottom when you're done. Having it kicked out one way or another is preferable.

The legit way is to drag around a friend from a rival team. The not so legit way is to have a low level extra account from a rival team.

After the defender is kicked out you prestige back a level and add a proper pokemon. Rinse and repeat until no bubble defenders are left.

A neat trick when you encounter a gym at almost 20, 30 or 40K prestige alone is to push it to the next level, and then you do not drop your preferred pokemon inside, but you add a bubble defender.

Eight short battles later the gym should reach next level again. Wait for someone to snipe the free spot and have your bubble defender kicked out. Add a little prestige and drop your prefered pokemon inside a substantially stronger gym. Works best at high traffic gym.

For gyms I don't care all that much about I'll sometimes push it to 50K and just leave my krabby inside in the hopes that the gym will fill upp. With some luck I might even be able to collect coins for my crabby.

For gyms I care about and that are very close to my home I do the same thing. The difference being that I check the gym from time to time to see if my krabby has been kicked out. Usually means the gym was either torn down or stands at level nine or ten. Time for some old fashioned prestige.

Please do rename your bubble attackers and defenders. If you name then 00something (zero zero something), they'll be at the top when you display your pokemon using the name-sorting. Picking out your attacking team takes ten to fifteen seconds rather than over a minute.

Raid

Using bubble strat or similar approaches enables a group to build a gym to level ten within minutes. Our record is two minutes, fifteen seconds, including half of the team having problems with their phones. This was done using a bubble-lookalike method where your attackers still take a lot of damage.

The method used here is immediately dropping two or three prestige pokemons inside when the gym is won. Each player will add 2 or 3K prestige to the gym before composing a new attacking team.

A full raid encountering no problems should be able to do this in one minute flat given (almost) identical defenders.

The main reason players have trouble with their phones is that slots get sniped while you add prestige to the gym, and this sometimes locks your phone in the dreaded "error" mode, which disables you from taking part in combat until one more pokemon has been added to the gym.