Fricking Gengar

November 3rd, from noon until 3pm local time, every raid was replaced by Gengar, with a chance to get a shiny one. It was a bit like the Moltres day, except Gengar’s a weird purple lump and Moltres is a legendary flaming chicken.

I never really understood the obsession with Gengar. Sure, he can get Shadow Ball, which is a high damage attack, and he’s a Ghost type Pokemon, but he’s also the most glass cannon-y of glass cannons. If you can get a nice Shadow Ball off Gengar, sure, the damage is good. But all it takes is one charge attack from a raid boss and you’re dead. Gengar also isn’t that useful when taking gyms since most of the time people shove normal types (like Blissey) or dark types (like Tyranitar) in gyms. At least, that’s what I see in most of the local gyms. Them and Exeggutors, Vapreons and Dragonites.

There’s also something else about Gengar and his pre-evolutions. For reasons unknown, I simply can’t catch them! Most throws I make either bounce harmlessly in front of them, bounce off their heads because they randomly move from side to side and attack constantly, or worse, GO THROUGH THEM! I watched FIVE raid Pokeballs go through a Gengar today! The times I actually do manage to land a good throw, the balls seem to just fly through them! You see, Gengar, Haunter and Gastly have really weird hitboxes AND are WAY further away than they appear! They stand at the same distance legendaries like Mewtwo stand, yet are large enough to look like they’re as close as Pokemon like Pinsir or Zangoose!

But you know what? Shiny Gengar isn’t that great either. You can hardly tell. I have a Shiny Gengar, it is the least shiny of the handful of shinies I have! It just has slightly less purple skin. Not even a change in the colour of its eyes. Sure, a Mega Gengar shiny might be cool but we’re probably a LOOOOOOOOOONG way off from Mega Evolutions.

At least the Shiny Gengar has a story behind it. The local Pokemon Go players all gathered at the one Ex Raid gym that hasn’t had an Ex Raid at it yet, and all 20 accounts (about 18 people total) did the Gengar Raid there together. No one got a shiny, funnily enough. We all then split up into three groups and headed down to Town Hall where there were 5 gyms (only 4 raids though since there’s a Deoxys Ex Raid at one of the gyms soon), doing those raids in groups.

Out of those 5 raids, I only caught one Gengar. After a lot of walking though, my blood sugar dropped so I basically lost all coordination and completely fucked up the last couple of raids and every single Pokeball throw in between. Thank heavens for getting carried. Low blood sugar makes me feel like shit, but the rest of the group wanted to go on, especially since we’d only found two shinies between the six of us. So they had enough accounts to reliably beat Gengar and so they could do the raids more quickly, I gave my bro my phone and told him to have fun while I sat in a cafe and drank some sort of sugary drink. He came back with a shiny for me and two shinies for himself, and said that four people got shinies in the last raid they all did.

So now I’ve got these 1400CP Gengars that need leveling up. Because Gengar’s enough of a glass cannon as he is! Having only 1400CP means they only have around 80 health each! Luckily I have a high CP Gastly that I evolved during the event, but he’s sitting at 1900CP and only has 89 health.

Oh and of course, they all have Lick and Psychic as their abilities because of the Gengar event. Lick is a pretty damn good move, on par with Shadow Claw (which is insanely strong) and there’s been much controversy over which move is better. At the end of the day, it doesn’t make much difference. But Psychic is a REALLY bad ability on Gengar since it’s a, uh, psychic attack on a Ghost type Pokemon. There are loads of Pokemon who do better with Psychic.

This means I have to use some of my Charge TMs, to give my Gengars better attacks…

Wait…

…

Fucking Focus Blast! It was on all my Mewtwos! It’s on my Mew! And now it’s on my damn Gengar too!

It’s a good move, but seriously! I’ve got enough Pokemon with Focus Blast already!

It wasn’t all bad though. I traded a Shedinja for a Moltres, after a poor guy in my local raid group opened his Research Breakthrough box too early and got a Moltres instead of a Shedinja. He has like 20 Moltres, so when I offered to trade my shitty dead insect for his flaming chicken, he leaped at the chance. At the same time, he only needed to open one ore gift to become Ultra Friends with me. That plus the Gengar Raids, using a Lucky Egg (which doubles XP gains), pushed him to level 40. Congrats, Phillipos, hopefully you’ll be able to recommend new Pokestop areas soon!

Best thing of all though? The first Pokemon I caught today… it was a shiny Pinsir.

Yeah.

I got two shinies in one day and three shinies in a week, the other being a shiny Poochyena on Halloween.

That’s probably all my luck used up for the rest of November…