Pokemon Go: Initial experiences with new Gen3, Dynamic Weather, Looking how weather affects IVs

Niantic has updated Pokemon Go to release 50 new Gen 3 pokemon into the game, as well as add a new dynamic weather system. Yesterday was my first fill day trying it out and these are my impressions so far.

I went on my typical long early morning pokewalk and managed to catch 7 of the new pokemon: Poochyena, Makuhita, Mudkip, Wurmple, Mawile, Mightyena, and Gulpin.

I got the Mawile as the bonus challenge for beating it as a level 2 raid boss. Obviously I'm eager to see all the new content in the game, but I'm hoping I can savor it for a while so I'm actually pretty content with not seeing everything on my first day hunting. I always get a little thrill when I see the silhouette of a pokemon I've never seen before show up in the Nearby indicator. I also think it's smart that Niantic is releasing Gen 3 in chunks, first with the spooky pokemon for Halloween and now another 50, with more still to come.

It was pretty cold here in Eugene, OR when I was out for my walk, several degrees below freezing. I have these gloves that convert between mittens and fingerless gloves that I use for playing the game in cold weather. They're a bit of a hassle to deal with but they mostly get the job done.

But an aspect of the weather that's much more interesting than the temperature is that Niantic has now updated Pokemon Go to dynamically track the weather and give you different bonuses depending on the type of Pokemon you're interacting with. For the early part of my walk the weather was foggy, while it switched to cloudy later on. You get 25 extra stardust for catching a pokemon of the appropriate type for the weather, moves of those type are more powerful in battle, more of those type of pokemon spawn than usual, and the ones that do spawn tend to have better IVs. (The hazardous weather referred to in the screenshot is an Air Stangnation Advisory in my area).

Because Poochyena seems to be relatively common and I caught a bunch of them during the foggy weather I was able to get a sense of how much better the weather-boosted IVs are than usual:

While that's not a huge sample size, it seems to be skewed enough in the positive direction from the IV distribution you'd normally encounter in the game that it's pretty impressive. It's not exactly like egg-hatches or raid bosses because I still got some that “may not be great in battle” or are just “decent” according my my Team Valor appraisal results, but it's still pretty good. Based on first impressions I think I'm going to really like the weather system. It will be like there's a constant mini-event going on, you'll have reason to be excited to see particular pokemon spawn, even after the novelty of the new generation launch wears off.