Can I Manually Remove My Pokémon from Gyms in Pokémon GO?

No, once you place a Pokémon in a gym to defend, there is no option to manually take it back yourself. Your Pokémon will remain in the gym, gradually losing "motivation" over time as it gets attacked and defeated in battles, until eventually it is knocked out completely by opposing team members and returned to you.

What Factors Determine How Long a Pokémon Can Defend a Gym?

There are a few key elements that control how long your Pokémon can potentially hold down a fort at gyms before being defeated. Understanding these mechanics is crucial for maximizing your PokéCoin income and getting the most gym time possible for your defenders.

Motivation Decay

The primary limiting factor is the motivation decay system added in 2017. As your Pokémon sits in a gym its motivation will continually drop over time at a fixed percent rate, eventually reaching zero percent motivation which instantly kicks the Pokémon out of the gym if it hasn‘t already been defeated:

As you can see, higher CP Pokémon will drain significantly faster. The thresholds are:

• CP < 3000: 1% motivation lost per hour
• CP >= 3000: 10% motivation lost per hour

This puts immense pressure on players to avoid using powerful legendaries, pseudos and high-CP Dragonite/Tyranitar/Snorlax if they want their defenders to last more than a few hours.

You can help slow motivation drain by remote feeding berries to your assigned Pokémon. But you are still limited to only 10 berry feeds per 30 minutes per Pokémon. Clever attackers can also time battles to repeatedly drain motivation faster than you can realistically feed back up.

Getting kicked out by motivation expiration rather than battle remains extremely common.

Maximum Daily PokéCoin Limits

The second core restriction is the 50 PokéCoin daily limit earned from gyms. Each Pokémon defending a gym provides 1 coin every 10 minutes. But no matter how many gyms or long they defend, once your total daily coin limit hits 50 that‘s all you can possibly acquire.

• At the 10 PokéCoin/hour rate, 8 hours 20 minutes defended provides the 50 coin total.

So Pokémon stuck defending beyond this don‘t help earn extra coins, limiting their usable gym time. You want to retrieve them before hitting the next day and waste the potential 50 coins they could generate instead then.

Optimizing returns requires actively tracking gym Pokémon. Sure you could let one sit for weeks defended, but that throws away hundreds of coins that other Pokémon could be churning daily by redeploying into new gyms repeatedly.

Choosing the Best Pokémon to Assign as Gym Defenders

Picking optimal defenders is critical to lasting as long as possible against waves of attacker battles and motivation drain to maximize PokéCoin income.

Blissey has reigned for years as undisputed champion gym defender thanks to its absurdly high HP. Combined with healing moves, it simply outlasts nearly any matchup. Chansey fills a similar role.

However, motivation mechanics have shifted evaluations considerably – now bulk is valued over sheer CP or Atk power:

Observe how Umbreon ranks among the elite now thanks to its stats aligning perfectly with motivation mechanics. Meanwhile the mighty Slaking regressed mightily – its gargantuan CP tanks lifetime so severely that practically anything can outlast it.

Let‘s analyze the derivations and implications of these scores in detail across various candidates…