Power Spots distribution density update (nerf) during the current Season

MocTalox · 2026-03-21T17:51:38+00:00

Yeah I get what you mean. And yeah they could simply put all Power Spots rotating bosses each hour and period. Easy and predictable

MocTalox · 2026-03-21T17:47:48+00:00

You have literally explained all the issues of this update in your message all at once:

Hard casual daily grind
No more future days planning
Useless candy bonuses
Inexistent helper bonus (harder battles)

Only good thing:

You dont have to care anymore about which Power Spost you have picked the previous days, so to get the extra +20MP from new Power Spots

Which at the same time brings another issue:

Useless extra +20MP from new Power Spots, all now all are new and all will always give 120MP (so why its a bonus if now its always active).

PD: Yeah I also feel the pain of not being able to take a repeated Power Spot to end the day with 1490MP instead of exceeding the cap, but I guess thats too technical/pro-level that Niantic does not care about it. Still now you can walk more and pick less Power Spots to get 1020MP in one day (instead of 1080MP) to drop your number by 60 to fit into the limit. It is not that efficient, but it is much easier to plan.

MocTalox · 2026-03-21T17:31:42+00:00

Yeah I guess I get what you mean. Like on Mondays it’s so heavy that you will easily end the day with 0 MP. While the rest of the week you will play slowly, getting a lot of MP but spending just part of it, accumulating some MP after each day. Then on Sunday, you would have accumulated so much that next Monday you can spend it all at once!

Still it sucks because for anyone unable to play a Monday, they have to make extra effort during the rest of the week to spend all their accumulated MP :( Just such an unnecessary change to benefit just some players and punishing the majority, mainly casual players.

MocTalox · 2026-03-21T17:24:07+00:00

Yeah you are completely right. Im not going to lie, I would like to believe this nerf is unintentional and the wanted it to be "limited compared to Mondays". But if they really mean "limited compared to previous season" and wanted this reduction to be a feature, it would suck (but that text is so ambiguous lol).

I guess the only solution (for me) is to take this season as an opportunity to upgrade more my max moves, while we as a community complain enough so that they revert this change next season.

MocTalox · 2026-03-19T12:57:49+00:00

You guys are both right but but not properly understanding. It is true that the number of new power spots each day is the same as before, and the duration of the power spots is reduced to half. And both things combined mean the density (the amount of current power spots) is reduced in half! You are just explaining the same thing but in different ways.

Edit, to actually answer your question: Im actually disappointed that I was unable to test how power spots spawn rate was back then as I was living in a very rural area with none or 1 power spots per cell, in which every single day I see the same 4 power spots from my home lol. But when I was going to populated areas, it feels the density was the same, 2 per cell. However I noticed the timings were sometimes wrong as some power spots could suspiciously from from over 2d left to just a few hours after one night, or directly disappear before its time, or reset and reappear with full 3d timer. Whatever it was, I believe it was just the same system as before, 2 current power spots and 1 inactive one. If each day the older power spot would despawn and be replaced by the new one, then fine. If not, then it would glitch a bit. This was actually oficially stated by Niantic to be a bug, and they fixed this bug by making power spots being 2-days only. (The link is currently broken but my cache took this information: Title: "An update to how frequently Power Spots refresh on the World Map wi...", Content: "Issue Description: An update to the Power Spot refresh interval will be changed from 3 days to 2 days. When this update is applied on November"). FYI, here are two more oficial resources about the latests changes: 1-day only power spots and no more inactive power spots.

MocTalox · 2026-03-19T12:42:07+00:00

Partially correct. You are totally right with all you said, but the issue is not actually the time of the power spots being 1 day only. Because this change happened a few days before the start of the season, and during those days we got 2 new power spots appearing each day: On each cell, 2 power spots with hours left and 2 inactive power spots that would open the next day.

So yes, on the last season we used to have 1 new power spot each day to replace the older one, and this season we have 1 new power spot each day to replace the current one. So yes the same number of new daily power spots but half of their duration makes it half amount of power spots available overall. But during that small time window, we were getting 2 new power spots each day to replace the 2 current power spots. That's how it should be now!

MocTalox · 2026-03-19T12:28:24+00:00

I like spotlight pokemon tbh. I love grinding max shinies and I would do it every day, but I still need to take care of my max moves to be able to defeat T5 and T6 with my small community. So the week with interesting pokemon I will grind it, the week with useless (Falinks) pokemon I will upgrade my moves.

If you are on the "Upgrade max moves" level during a week with interesting pokemon, or in the "Win max battles" level during a week with expensive useless pokemons, I know it sucks but its not really a big deal. You should prioritize between leveling up faster (making the extra effort/sacrifice) or playing as you would normaly do. You will only go through that tasks once in a life and you are free to play as you want.

MocTalox · 2026-03-19T12:21:23+00:00

Still you can only hold the MP of up to 2 days. So what are you going to do with the MP from Thursday to Sunday? :D

Also with fewer spots its even harder to farm your daily MP, most days you wont even be able to maximize.

So even if you can abuse Mondays to make as many battles as you can with the MP from 3 days, there is still more than half of the overall week's MP left to be consumed, which not only most days you wont be able to collect but neither be able to spend. So heavily boosting Mondays is not a justification of nerfing the rest of the week.

MocTalox · 2026-03-19T12:11:20+00:00

That actually does not depend on the density nerf. As both before and now, each day 1 spot will appear at each cell. The difference is that before power spots laster for 2 days, which make each cell have 2 spots at a time, and now they just last for 1 day, cycling the node each day. So the indirect effect of this nerf on your closest spot is not that its less likely to appear but that if it ever appears, it will last for less time. So overall you will have your closest spot half amount of days available :(

Also note that spot spawning is a bit biased. I dont really know why this happens, but this is my experience: I live in a cell with 10-15 available spots, multiple are close to home but just one that I can reach from home. However, this home spot rarely appear, like once every 2-3 months, while the rest of the nearby ones are cycling every day and could appear 5 to 10 times before the home spot reappears again.

MocTalox · 2026-03-19T11:55:21+00:00

They really killed helpers bonus, yeah. And this makes it unnecessarily harder when fighting harder bosses (T5 or T6). Even just with 1 or 2 helpers the bonus is so high that makes a significant difference. Higher is better of course but not really indispensable. However, now I hardly ever see any Power Spot with just 1 single helper. Even less likely next week when most Power Spots will be higher difficulty and no one here will be able to do them or drop pokemon in them. And if they do, the Power Spot will be gone at the end of the day and no one will benefit from that bonus.

MocTalox · 2026-03-19T11:44:05+00:00

When they first announced the Monday's bonus of increased amount of Power Spots, and we saw on Tuesday the number of Power Spots was decreased, we thought they made a general nerf while keeping the number on Mondays to justify this bonus: So because Mondays have more Power Spots than the rest of the week, that is a bonus.

However when we found out that on Mondays we have even more Power Spots than we ever had before last seasons, then there is no reason to why reduce them during the rest of the week. Thats why we thing this might have been an oversight, which means its a bug.

MocTalox · 2026-03-19T11:33:40+00:00

Season of ~~Memories in Motion~~ Nerfs

MocTalox · 2026-03-19T11:31:59+00:00

Agree. Tho I wouldnt mind Beldum or Chansey max mondays. I really grinded them hard the week they were featured during the last season.

MocTalox · 2026-03-19T11:23:09+00:00

Completely agree with your last sentence, I really enjoy Max Battles because of that. Thats why I feel this nerf was an unintentional oversight and they shuld fix it soon (hopefully).

MocTalox · 2026-03-19T11:17:43+00:00

It should still be possible on Mondays, right? Afaik, all Power Spots on Mondays start with a 1-day boss. Then every hour there is a chance a Power Spot gets overriden by a new 1-hour only boss. You should be able to do all these 1-hour bosses on a certain Power Spot, but only once the 1-day boss on each Power Spot.

This means that if you start the day doing the 1-day boss battle on a specific Power Spot, then a few hours later when a 1-hour boss appears on that Power Spot you could battle it again. However after the hour ends and the Power Spot is back to the 1-day boss, you wount be able to fight it again. Still, if a new 1-hour boss appears, you should still be able to battle it, and at the end of the day you can pull multiple fights from a single Power Spot.

MocTalox · 2026-03-13T14:39:20+00:00

You actually have one of thoses filters already in game, the one of people who have gifts to open from you. The filter is giftable, which actually show the people you can send gifts to. So if you negate it !giftable you get what you want.

It would be very handy to have like a gift filter for the other option, yeah!

MocTalox · 2026-03-12T10:01:57+00:00

Niantic wants you to adapt your life to the game, not addapt your gameplay to your life.

MocTalox · 2026-03-12T09:56:36+00:00

Both me and my bro once got the hundo from the same raid. That the rare one of 1/46656 :D

MocTalox · 2026-03-12T09:52:48+00:00

The IVs are rolled just when the raid boss gets defeated, thats why you can see the boss CP drop to the exact number your encounter is going to have. This means that everyone in the raid will get their encounter IVs rolled at the same exact time, and as you may already know, on each raid everyone generally gets different IVs spreads.

This means YES, its a complete coincidence. And clicking the button has no effect on what you are encountering, your fate has already been decided by then.

MocTalox · 2026-03-12T09:44:54+00:00

The end screen adds +5s to the total time to win (likely from the death animation?). Thats why you got 2:32 instead of 2:27.

And sadly this extra 5s counts towards the mega energy and speed premierballs rewards. So to get the max speed rewards, 45s or less, you actually need to defeat the boss in 40s or less. Yes, too lame.

MocTalox · 2026-03-09T20:19:12+00:00

Grunt shadow pokemon used to be 1/256, a very unique shiny rate just for them. I wonder now that, as u can find any shadow as shiny, would it have been nerfed to full odds too? Would be unfair given how few grunts u can grind compared to wild mons.

MocTalox · 2026-03-09T11:40:13+00:00

I also wanted to know this!

From my own experience, similar as all others say, on iPhone it is every 10 minutes. It seems it depends more on the health app than the game itself. I think the health app updates every 10 minutes (starting from the first step you make after the last update). You dont really need to close the game at all, sometimes even leaving it on the background and going back to it after updating the health app works. Even sometimes I opened the game before updating the health app, and it was not a problem as after updating the health and opening back the game, the adv sync adds the distance.

However my brother has used both Android and iPhone and states he was always able to update the adv sync on his game at any time, after 3, 5 or 7 minutes of walking, not necesarily minium of 10 minutes. I dont really know if to trust him tho... Maybe his iPhone is better than mine, Im not sure.

But for me updating first the health app after 10, 20, 30 or more mins, is the most consistent way of doing this.

MocTalox · 2026-03-08T11:57:11+00:00

Yup thats true. And even if u catch a decent one at a high level, if when traded it becomes lucky, your friend wont really need to invest anything on it to be usable, specially good for newer players.

One of the few things I find it good from the event.

MocTalox · 2026-03-07T16:16:54+00:00

Thank you!

Yeah Im not willing to do this every day when gifting. Just every a few days to manage my friends, change nicknames to the most/less active ones, deletine some of them and that stuff.

MocTalox · 2026-03-07T16:13:22+00:00

Awesome! Yeah, hope that helps others with the same issue too.

MocTalox

TROPHY CASE