Pokémon Go Guide: How To Use The New Appraisal System

Pokémon Go recently introduced a new Appraisal System in the game. A lot has been said about this update with some going as far to say that this may be the best Quality of Life update that the game has so far released. What the update mainly does is to display the Individual Values (IVs) of your Pokémon.

For some Trainers, these may not be new, as different third-party apps have already been trying to do it. This update means that Niantic has finally accepted the need for this functionality and integrated it to the game.

How does the new Pokémon Go Appraisal System work?

Before we dive deep into that, let's discuss first how important this feature is. Basically, the IVs determine the potential of your Pokémon. With the Appraisal System, Trainers can know more about the attack, defense, and stamina of their Pokémon. As an added bit of fun, while the ratings are the same, Trainers get different conversation responses depending on what team they are on.

What makes the new system better is that Trainers can now get the exact number of each stat. Before, the appraisal system only focused on the strongest stat.

How to Start

Trainers know that each Pokémon has unique abilities that impacts how they attack and defend in battle. To know more about the abilities of their Pokémon, players need to get an appraisal. The Appraisal System brings out more detailed information. To activate this feature, Trainers need to:

1. Select the Main Menu in Map View
2. Select Pokémon
3. Choose a Pokémon from the list
4. Open the Menu
5. Select Appraise

What happens then?

Appraisal Stars

Well, you get to see Appraisal Stars. Ranging from 0% to 100%, these represent the overall IV score of your Pokémon. Depending on the IV of your Pokémon, you get corresponding stars. These are:

• 0 Stars: <50%
• 1 Star: 51.1% - 64.4%
• 2 Stars: 66.7% - 80.0%
• 3 Stars: 82.2% - 97.8%
• 4 Stars: 100%
  • Shown as 3 Stars with red background

However it's not just about knowing what star you Pokémon is. This new feature also allows Trainers to filter their Pokémon by stars. With this, Trainers know which ones to use in battle and which ones need to be upgraded.

The Silph Road has posted on Reddit a possible list of search strings which are not limited to just filtering by stats. You can view their initial list here.

IV Values

Once you press Appraise, you are shown three bars that represent

• Attack
• Defense
• Stamina (HP)

The position of each of the bars represent an IV value, with the smallest being 0 and the maximum at 15. You can see below how the IV values look like depending on the position of the bar.

So how does this work exactly?

Let's say your Pokémon has these stats:

• Attack: 12
• Defense: 10
• Stamina: 12

This would give you a total of 34. Now the total maximum possible stat is 45, meaning all three are maxed out. That means your Pokémon has an IV rating of around 75%. These means that your Pokémon gets 2 stars.

Let's try another one. Say you have a Pokémon that has good stamina but doesn't do to well in attack and defense. It could have something like this:

• Attack: 6
• Defense: 8
• Stamina: 12

This gives you a total of 26, which is about 57% of 45. So your Pokémon would be rated as 1 star.

Pretty easy huh?

If that's not enough, Niantic went even further with the Appraisal System. Once you enter this feature, you are likely to notice left and right arrows on the appraisal system. If you're guessing you can swipe between Pokémon, you're right. You can swipe to the next (or previous) Pokémon and they are immediately appraised. This feature works on the list that you loaded when you started appraising. You can search first for any hatched Pokémon, for example, appraise one and then be able to see the IV of all the others in your collection.

You might be wondering what the use of an knowing the IVs of Pokémon is if you're not the type to do Trainer Battles. If you're simply collecting Pokémon and hoping to catch them all, then yes, there is no major need to appraise them. However it is possible that you may not like Trainer Battles, but do the occasional high-tier raids. Then you will need to know the stat of your Pokémon.

So have you tried the new Appraisal System yet? Tell us your thoughts.