Pokemon GO Power Leveling Strategy

If catching and training the most powerful Pokemon is one of your goals in Pokemon GO, then this strategy is for you. In this article, we will cover the most effective way to level up your Trainer avatar, thus giving you access to more powerful Pokemons in the wild.

Why Trainer Level is Important

Your Pokemon GO Trainer level is the single most important metric to getting high CP (Combat Power) Pokemons. For instance, when you encounter a Pidgey in the wild, your Trainer level directly impacts how high that Pidgey’s CP could be. As your Trainer’s level increases, you will get chances to encounter Pidgeys with higher and higher CP. Based on the Silph Road’s source code discussions on Reddit, the CP of Pokemons found in the wild appears to max out at Trainer level 30. What this means is that after your Trainer reaches level 30, you will have opportunities to encounter Pokemons with highest CP that will ever exist in the wild. And subsequent to capturing a Pokemon, how high you can power up your Pokemon to is also determined by your Trainer level. Currently, at Trainer level 40 is where you will be able to power up your Pokemons to their maximum CP potential.

Given what we know now, players trying to catch powerful Pokemons should focus on reaching level 30 as quickly as they can. This enables access to Pokemons with the highest possible CP in the wild. When such high CP Pokemons are caught, then it becomes worthwhile to spend significant Stardust and Candies to power them up to their maximum CP potential. The reasoning behind powering up from the highest CP Pokemons is that this consumes the least amount of Stardust and Candies. If you had started with a lower CP Pokemon, then you will end up having to use more Stardust and Candies while getting no benefits in the final maximum Pokemon stats and CP.

Level Up Trainer Effectively

Reaching Trainer level 30 requires a lot of XP (experience points), or 2 million XP in total to be exact. From level 30 to 40, it’s exponentially more difficult, requiring a whopping 20 million XP in total! Therefore, having a system to effectively accumulate XP will help tremendously towards reaching those lofty levels.

When analyzing the amount of XP a player receives for doing various actions, it quickly becomes apparent that evolving a Pokemon consistently gives the highest XP by far. For example, evolving a Pokemon gives 500 XP while catching a Pokemon gives 100 XP or up to 200 XP in total if the catch earns the excellent throw award. Now imagine if we had saved up enough evolutions to use in conjunction with a lucky egg, we would be earning 1000 XP per Pokemon evolution! Since a lucky egg lasts for 30 minutes, it is best to save up 50-60 Pokemons for evolution before activating a lucky egg.

Now if you are playing Pokemon GO on 2 devices, such as on a smartphone and a tablet, and you want to be super aggressive, then you can consider doing this power leveling on both devices at the same time. So while you wait for the evolution animation to finish on one device, you could start another evolution on the second device. Theoretically you could easily do 100 plus evolutions in the 30 minute period. And yes, the XP gains on both devices will be counted.

Utilizing the strategy above would also make catching Pokemons that require only 12 Candies to evolve the highest priority. A simple calculation will show that these give the most evolution XP per resources. So get excited the next time you see a low CP Pidgey, Caterpie, or Weedle. Not only are they very easy to catch, they also offer the best XP gain per resources.

Lucky Egg

Lucky eggs are rare to come by. You won’t get them from Pokestops. The only way to get these lucky eggs for free is from rewards given when your Trainer levels up. The known lucky egg rewards are given when your Trainer reaches levels 9, 10, 15, 20 (2 eggs), 25 and 30 (3 eggs). That makes a total of 9 lucky eggs, so use them wisely.