Road to level 50 – An experience to remember

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First of all, I have to admit that I’ve been very absent from my role and responsibilities as a writer since the last Go Fest on Dortmund and this is my “I’m sorry, take me back as your writer” article. For a complete leveling guide to level 50, check out our Pokémon GO Level 40 to 50 Guide: XP, Tasks and Rewards

The main motive is my schedule, because besides Go Hub, I’m an Engineer, I write for another website in Portugal and I’m a community manager on Discord (currently hosting another PvP event). The hidden motive is that I’ve lost some interest in the game for some time and the pandemics haven’t helped turning the ship back.

Anyway, I’m not really here to boring you with the circumstances of my life. I mean I am, but only related to my experience rushing to level 50 and this was what encouraged me:

Despite my absenteeism, Pokémon Go Hub family is the best (I’m not kidding) because no matter how long I’m gone, they’ll always welcome me back with a smile on their beautiful faces and a kind word, making me feel like I was only gone for a few hours.

Therefore, here is it my experience rushing to level 50 during the pandemics.

Note: Along all the way, I never had to worry about the medals, since I already had 34 platinum, and got the last one needed during level 47 (Ace Trainer). I also already had 160 million XP when the new levels were release worldwide, so my goal was to gather 16 million of XP until February and with all the extra free XP, it was fairly easy.

Level 41

As a player with a good amount of stardust and an exquisite taste for powering up Pokémon’s to level 40 (currently own 255 level 40’s), powering up a Legendary 20 times was just a walk in the park and I’ve chosen my 98% Shiny (Lucky) Cresselia to do so. Disclaimer: It isn’t a great pokemon when it’s maxed, don’t follow my lead here.

The 30 raids task had totally broken my rules on doing raids. I only spend remotes on legendary and on that day, everyone was doing Espurr like crazy. I’ve got caught on that money burning killing-spree and there was no turning back, mainly because I had already started catching the 200 Pokémon. The important thing while doing this, is planning ahead where you can do it and in which day you’ll be able play all the time you need. You don’t really want to be left halfway and start all over again next day.

The 200 Pokémon may seem challenging during this times, specially for anyone who lives in a deserted or poorly populated area (talking about the spawns, of course), but nowadays, with the incense, everything is possible.

Things to do during this tasks: gathering enough Eevee’s, caught using pinaps if the candy count is scarce. Also gathering Pokémon’s (and the respective item and candy) that need any kind of item to evolve.

Level 42

Evolving Eevee to all of it final stages was a bust for me, due to my lack of luck. Took me 31 random Eeveelutions to get freaking Vaporeon… If it wasn’t for this sharpen rock in my shoe, I could’ve easily managed to level up within one day.

Using items to evolve Pokémon 15 times is a tricky one if you are space freak as me. My bag has 3000 spots, but it’s composed by 2200-2500 balls normally, so I delete most of the items to evolve Pokémon’s. Big mistake… Anyway, with the PvP against friends and PvE, I managed to get some Sinnoh Stones and close the deal.

Make 3 excellent throws is rather comic. It isn’t even in a row… Come on Niantic, there are normal quests more challenging than this.

Using 200 berries to help catch Pokémon is also an easy task. Even if you don’t have enough berries, opening gifts provide a fair amount of them each day (mostly pinup).

Level 43

Earning 100,000 stardust seems like a big number, but it really isn’t. With all the stardust boosts (weather and evolutions), you need to catch less than 1000 Pokémon to achieve this goal. In this task I relied on incenses once more, swept my tasks stash and had the luck of having some spawns at work, it took me less than a day and a half.

Using 200 super effective charged attacks can be boring if you’re not planning on doing raids and don’t like fighting on Go Battle League. I started battling against Candela on Ultra League (she doesn’t shield) with Hydro Canon/Ice Beam Blastoise (level 40). After I get home, I decided to pick up another phone with the game installed and while using a low level Mankey with Low Sweep (any low CP fighting Pokémon works), battled against my girlfriend account with Blissey and Snorlax (without attacking back or shielding). Since there isn’t a timer when PvPing agains friends, I could easily achieve a fair amount of Charged Attacks during each match up. It felt dirty, but it isn’t really illegal, so.

Catching 5 Legendary Pokemon can take 4 days if you’re relying on free raid passes, so if it is the case, that 4 days is the time set point that you should be aiming to complete the rest of the tasks, in order to level up.

Level 44

Man, I hated this level, despite being one of the easiest, because I had two smartphones and repeated the previous level trick to help my soul doing this kind of boring tasks. This time around I did it while battling to win 30 trainer battles in each league, stashing my girlfriend team with low cp Pokémon (one hit battle). I did this because really don’t like battling on Pokémon go, the battling system bores the hell out of me.

Battling 20 times on Go Battle League was a pain in the ass, but I’ve managed to win 17 out of 20, so I’ve got some nice perks. Anyway, I would rather not battle at all, but I understand why I had to do it.

Level 45

This one was a treat for me. Not that I like battling grunts (it’s hideous), but I really like the art of managing time, and optimizing the process along the way, which I am familiar to, because I use this tools everyday on my day job, as a manufacturing process engineer.

I needed to manage the time in a very peculiar way because, during this time, the zone where I live had a demanding curfew at 1 PM. So, to do the grunt efficiently I used two smartphones and a lot of gas.

Despite that, I’m not a poor soul, because my hometown has now around 100 pokestops on sight (60 or so created by me), and I took fully advantage of this, mainly because I was not planning to waste money on rocket radars (and I didn’t). That said, everyday, for 4 days in a row, I woke up every morning as earlier as I could and turned on the game on my girlfriend’s account (she had an unused rocket radar) in order to check where the grunts were spawning and where the Rocket Leaders were located.

I wandered around town (almost desert), always planning my routes accordingly with the grunts spawns and density, and whenever I started a fight, I was moving on to the next one. I know that fighting and succeed, while driving, without looking to de screen, can be challenging, but the grunt are a piece of cake. Whenever the next balloon was about to pop, I always made sure that a radar was ready. I did this mostly because the amount of leaders varies, and there was a day with only 7. So, after 4 days and 19 hours driving around town, I managed to defeat 50 Cliffs/Arlos/Sierras, getting two shiny Omanyte (one of them 15/15/11) and a shiny Growlithe. Can’t complain.

The purify part was a salty one. I’m not really into purify Pokémon’s, in my opinion it’s a complete waste of resources. The good thing was my habit of keeping cheap shadow Pokémon like Zubat, Rattata or Weedle on my bag, for whenever there are researches that demands to purify some Pokémon. That and the ones that I caught during the process, made about 40+ low cost Pokémon to purify. My piece of advice: don’t rush into purify Pokémon. You only need to purify 100  out of 350, so, wait until the end to make sure you purify first all the 1k shadow Pokémon.

My other advice is: look out for your items bag capacity, mainly if you use a Plus to spin stops automatically… If it’s full, you’ll miss rocket radar parts unnecessarily, happened to me three times – freaking annoying.

Things to do during this tasks: focus on hatching 10km and 5km eggs in order to horde 2km to facilitate your job in the next level.

Level 46

On this level, since you have to take a picture to your buddy 7 days in a row, you’ll have plenty of time to complete all the other tasks.

The 100 field research, requires that you manage to complete about 15 per day, I did most of all during the weekend when I had to do some errands. The 50 excellent throws in 7 days it’s manageable. The 30 eggs can be hard if you’re only counting on the infinite incubator, since you’ll have to open more than 4 eggs per day (most of the days). Gladly I knew about this task from the beginning, so I saved some incubators for this moment, that I’ve got from research.

Level 47

A lots of fun happened during the path to level 47.

First and foremost, the task of winning raids using a team of all unique Pokémon species was fun. I haven’t used a lot of my maxed Pokémon’s for raids in a long time and this was the perfect moment to do it, even if most of the raids were Rufflet (or freaking Espurr 2.0). Everybody went absolutely bananas for that shiny strange bird and almost no one got it.

The task of wining a three-star raids using only Pokemon with 1,500 cp or less is frankly a bust, since you can have help. Pretty disappointed with this, but well, it is what it is.

Powering up 3 Pokémon to their max CP was a shot through the heart, mainly because I only had Wooper candy to do it. I was lucky with the December Community Day, but planned it very poorly. I was focusing on Weedle, Rhyhorn, Charmander and Magmar, while Magikarp should have been my priority. I managed to get enough Weedle Candy XL before the first monday to level up, even without transforming that many normal candy. But Rhyhorn, Charmander and Magmar were a bust and the way I neglect Magikarp left me 60 candy XL away, even after transforming 12,000 normal candy into candy XL.

So, knowing that I would miss a week duo to my planning fail, I had to make Magikarp my personal quest, for it was the bottle neck on my progression to level 50. In order to get enough candy to max it out before the second chance to level up, I had to move a lot. Traded for 500+ magikarp in a week with more than 30 different people, some of them even had to instal the game to give me some old ass orange karps and for a week, every special trade that I’ve done was shiny magikarp. Aside from that, I had to drive for 100 km especially to trade for this fish. I was a man on a mission called “The Magikarp Rush” and I’ve succeed! After the last power up to my 100% IV Gyarados, I was finally on level 47.

Level 48

After some rushing, the process to get to level 48 gave me some time to relax. This level is a treat, the biggest resemblance to retirement during this process!

While I suggest that you start working in your buddies from the beginning, it is still possible to level a buddy up to 3 stars during the first weeks out of the 8 needed, in order to get the 10 souvenirs required.

Earning the 300 hearts with your buddy is the easiest thing to do, since you only need to get 5 a day to complete this task. Knowing that during a day you can change buddies 20 times, the simple act of feeding, taking a picture and playing with each buddy, can get you up to 60 hearts in a few hours. So you can have that covered in less than a week, no biggie, no pressure.

The walking part can be difficult if you live in an apartment. You’ll still need to cover about 3,6 km/day to get the 25 km each week. But since the 200 km adds up to the final sum of 8 weeks walking 25 km, you won’t need to be rushing with this as well.

Level 49

Thing just got serious on monday (February the 8th) after leveling up to 48.

This level demands commitment from the very beginning if you want to achieve level 50 by friday, and that’s what I’ve done. Mainly by pissing people off everyday, using the Bernie Sanders meme stating “I am once again asking if you can open my gifts“, or writing some wack-ass menacing poetry like “Here I am // This is me // Asking you to open my gifts // And then be free“. Glad it worked, thank you fam and friends, you’re free now!

The 10 trades with pokemon caught at least 300 km apart wasn’t hard at all, since I still have some Pokémon’s from the countries I travelled to, when that was something possible. But even if you don’t use to travel, you can still get the those Pokémon by hatching eggs from gift sent by far away friends. You should have the 10 Pokémon saved before getting to this level, I mean, it’s one less thing to be worried about during this stressing days.

The 50 Lucky Pokémon in trades is a tricky one. I was pretty lucky and 404 trades resulted in 48 Lucky Pokémon. So at midnight from thursday to friday I just had to seal the deal with a guaranteed lucky trade and a random one. Everyday I managed to arrange a lucky trade, at least, so it was 5 less random lucky to worry about. This might been an isolated case, there are awful luck related to this kind of dynamic. One of my friends couldn’t get more than 2 Lucky Pokémon in 101 trades, at the first day, so he was off to a hard start. In the past something like that happened to me, after the Swinub CD. I made the 101 trades ZERO Lucky Pokémon and on the next day, I had to make 35 more trades until I get to see the orange background. When this happens, it’s hard to swallow it, but don’t get frustrated, since it’s not your fault and you can’t really do nothing to change that (only if you have a lot of lucky friends willing to do normal trades).

Level 50

The excitement was real, because I took the day off and I was ready to grind as hard as never did since the last Go Fest in Dortmund. So, for 7 and a half straight hours there was nothing else in my life aside from playing Pokémon Go.

I did every task in those 7,5 hours, aside from reaching the rank 10 in Go Battle, of course. Reaching Rank 10 was done at cost and pain, during the weeks before getting to level 48. Luckily I was a late to this season, so I managed to win 14 battles in a row on Ultra League and then 16 in a row on Ultra and Master League combined (still active, this streak), not bad for someone who really doesn’t like battling and uses always the same teams, uhm?

Returning to the grind from friday (the 12th), I started with the raids to get that out of the way, despite Latios and Latias not being “excellent throw friendly”. That being done, I jumped for the Rocket Leaders. Somehow I managed to precisely timing the “Level 45 Challenge“, an this allowed me to get 3 rocket radars in the prior day to leveling up to 50 and in less than half an hour it was done.

My piece of advice? With the current bosses, you should avoid battling against Cliff at all costs, since his first Pokémon it’s a freaking Aerodactyl with 10k of CP and you’ll be off to a rough start. The most accessible is Arlo and with luck you can face 3 steel types at once (Beldum, Aggron and Scizor). I used a CP2491 Delphox with Flame Charge (easy to charge fast), a level 40 Hydro Canon/Ice Beam Blastoise and, in the final spot, I varied between a CP2499 Dark Pulse Darkrai and a level 40 Dynamic Punch/Mud Bomb Croagunk. The best tactic to make it easier was switching between Pokémon’s every time you can (to make the most of the opponent delay at the start of each “new” match up). Ow, having a Togekiss is also a good idea, just in case (Salamence)!

The 999 excellent throws part was the most demanding and awesome thing I ever done on this game. Some cool stats from this insane grind were the 205 excellent throws that I’ve got within a hour, the 27 excellent in a row with the help of nanab berry and 9 excellent in a row without it.

Disclaimer: from the 27 excellent in a row, 10 were on an ivysaur, 7 on a Chameleon and 6 on a Magmar, so this achievement wasn’t that bright, I guess.

Must say that I had some luck in what comes to timing, since the spawns from the current event were very helpful. Maybe aside from Goldeen and Krabby that were tricky at the beginning and mostly Darumaka (the dancing prick) and Magikarp (what the hell, the karp is in a different dimension).

Finally I got to level 50, 1 week later that the rest of the world and 2 weeks later than the testing headquarters called Australia. This got me two dope jackets, my main goal in rushing to level 50 (kidding). I’m not a fan of wasting coins in clothes, so it was a nice perk, though.

The Aftermath

Getting to level 50, for those who already have the XP and are rushing, it’s a pretty fun and wild ride, during which you will always be pushing for your limits. I like this feeling so it suited me perfectly.
Anyway, for anyone that just got to level 40 recently, just enjoy the ride, because you will have a lot of stuff to do and it will keep you motivated for some time – level wise and side quests wise.

In my opinion, it isn’t hard to get to level 50. It’s a shame that this leveling up model wasn’t designed to the levels before 40, because as I said above, it’s lots of fun (only relying on XP is bland). While doing it so, you’re training your skills and learning about the entire potencial of this game. It’s only a shame that the rewards weren’t that exciting, mainly the Rare Candy XL. But oh well, we can’t have it all.

For my next chapter? I’ll be doing what pleases me most in this collectors game: maxing Pokémon!

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DiogodosSantos
DiogodosSantoshttps://echoboomer.pt/author/diogo-dos-santos/
Engineer. Music lover. Sports enthusiast. Video Games Reviewer. Pokémon anime isn't good enough for its universe.

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