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So I just came back from a 4 hour gym run. I'm Instinct, and had to empty out every gym.
I mostly hate this update. On one hand, the TOTAL number of fights you need to clean out the gym is much lower (like 36 vs old 50). On the other, I feel like it's so tedious that I see 4 mons in a gym and immediately think about giving up regardless of the CP of the mons in it.
The way it seems to work is that the heart has 6 fights' worth of motivation. If you win a fight once against a defender with a full heart, you have like 5 more fights left to kick it out; on a side note, every time you beat it, the defender's CP loses a large chunk. Once the heart is empty, the CP number turns into a dark red colour and you have to beat it then to kick it out. My ballpark for the threshold for dark red CP is about 1/3 of the original CP. I don't know what actually goes into the CP reduction calculations (for losing fights, and for time decay), it seems to be dependent on the Pokemon. e.g. I have a 153 CP karp who lost like 4 CP over 30 minutes while a Dragonite lost a few hundred.
From what I can tell, feeding a Pokemon berries gives you two heart tiers. At least, that's what I saw with Nanab berries. Dunno about the others.
So what does this mean?
It means every Pokemon, shitmon or Blissey, is guaranteed min 6 fights each before getting kicked out. If Niantic broke their existing anti-gym sniping measures or you take too long to give that defender a hyper potion, have fun fighting somebody's shitmon 6+ times because they sniped you. Also this assumes that nobody is going to come by and add Pokemon and keep feeding it berries. Can't keep it topped off just because it loses a few CP every few minutes though, wouldn't let me. So I'm guessing it has to lose full tiers before getting hungry again.
tl;dr - It made defending for shitters with shitmons and attacking is only easy in the best case where there is nobody around replacing mons and feeding mons berries. aka. fuck Instinct