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Pokemon GO: CP or Move Strength – Which is More Important

Here's what you need to know when raising your Pokemon army.
This article is over 8 years old and may contain outdated information

In Pokemon GO, your Pokemon come with two important battle stats: their CP, which stands for combat power, and their move strength, which is the damage output of their individual moves. If you’re looking to tear down Gyms in your neighborhood, you’re going to need strong Pokemon, and you’ll have to know which stat to prioritize.

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Here are a few things you need to take note of:

  • CP can always be increased simply by powering up a Pokemon
  • Move strength is random, and it can’t be increased
  • A Pokemon’s move set is also random, and it might actually change when you evolve it

With that in mind, which is actually more important? The truth is, you really shouldn’t be worrying about move sets and strength until your Pokemon is in its final evolution stage. Let’s say you have two Rattatas with two different move sets. The lower CP Rattata has a good move set with decent move strength, while the higher CP Rattata has terrible move strength. What you should do is focus on evolving the high CP Rattata first. Once it’s evolved into a Raticate, take a look at its moves and strength, and see if you’re satisfied with them. If not, then evolve the low CP Rattata and see what you get with that one.

Essentially, move sets and strength don’t matter until your Pokemon have fully evolved. As your trainer level goes up, you’ll encounter higher CP Pokemon anyway, so focus on catching high CP Pokemon and evolving them before taking a look at their move set, since those usually change up anyway.

With this knowledge, you should have a better idea of what you want to prioritize in Pokemon GO when it comes to raising a Pokemon army.


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Author
Image of Zhiqing Wan
Zhiqing Wan
Zhiqing is the Reviews Editor for Twinfinite, and a History graduate from Singapore. She's been in the games media industry for nine years, trawling through showfloors, conferences, and spending a ridiculous amount of time making in-depth spreadsheets for min-max-y RPGs. When she's not singing the praises of Amazon's Kindle as the greatest technological invention of the past two decades, you can probably find her in a FromSoft rabbit hole.