Pokemon Go is now available on iOS and Android devices. (Nintendo)
A new Pokemon Go update has made a small but important change to the way the game is played.
As revealed in the latest update’s patch notes, Pokemon can now faint during training, requiring a revive. This is as opposed to the old system, where if a Pokemon got defeated while training at a friendly gym, they would always come back with 1HP.
Pokemon now also need to be revived if they were defending a gym that has been taken over. Before this update, they’d simply go down to 1HP.
Revives have suddenly become much more useful, whereas prior to today, many players were actually complaining that their inventory was full of way too many of them; they would find themselves throwing out revives just to make room for other items that they need more frequently. If you’ve been doing that, keep in mind that after this update, you’ll probably want to hold on to all your revives from now on.
It wasn’t clear for a while whether this 1HP situation was a glitch or an intentional feature, but Niantic now says that it was the former, as the patch notes refer to it as “a bug.” Niantic also writes that they’re working on rebalancing the training battle.
This 1HP change is one of two major alterations in the latest patch. The other is a new “appraisal” feature, where players can talk to their team leader to get more information about how strong a Pokemon is. This is in part meant to discourage gamers from using third party IV calculators, instead getting the information from the app itself.
Still to be added in a future update is a trading feature, as well as some sort of permanent fix to the nearby tracker. Pokemon Go updates are generally released every two weeks, meaning the next major patch should hit the app stores on September 5th.