Latias is a Bitch

All of a sudden, after the Lugia and Ho-Oh event and the Kyogre and Groudon event, there’s suddenly a Latias event. Just Latias. The red and white airplane dragon Pokemon. You know, the one that’s paired up with Latios, the blue and white airplane dragon Pokemon. This mini-event popped up out of the blue just as people were getting kinda hyped up for the Clamperl Research event. In fact, a lot of people didn’t even see the announcement as it kinda got buried by the Treecko Community Day announcement.

So yeah, Latias is currently in Level 5 raids, somewhat sharing a pool with Palkia, although Palkia raids as I write this seemed far less common than Latias raids. Palkia raids are slowly being phased out anyway. Not that it makes much difference because Latias, like Palkia and Giratina before it, is a Dragon-Type. Latias though, just like Cresselia before it, is also a Psychic-Type. So we have a weird Dragon/Psychic-Type combo.

Wonderful.

In theory this means you have a wider pool of Pokemon you can throw at Latias, but really, it doesn’t work like that.

On the one hand, you can throw your normal Tyranitars at it. But funnily enough, while Tyranitar is good, it’s not the best damage dealer, and you really want to deal as much damage as possible so you can get those +2 or +3 Pokeballs. Latias’s attacks also do a fuckton of damage, which means your Tyranitars will only be able to survive well against a Psychic-basted Latias. You could also throw Gengar and Shadow Ball Mewtwo at Latias but again, because of its damage, you’ll lose Pokemon fast.

Your other options are Dragon-Types, Ice-Types or Fairy-Types.

Right out the gate, Fairy-Types are worthless unless you have maxed out Gallade or Gardevoir or maybe Togekisses. Most Fairy-Types are only good in gyms. They’re tanky and deal very little damage otherwise.

Ice-Types are also iffy. While they do deal a lot more damage to Dragon-Types than even Fairy-Types, they don’t seem to do as much damage as Dragon-Types do to other Dragon-Types. I mean, Mamoswine (from the recent Swinub event) would be perfect for Latias raids but it attacks pretty slowly and you need to sink Charge TMs into your Mamoswines to get the one Ice-Type move they have.

The best bet is to just throw Dragon-Types at Latias. Just like you do with Palkia and Giratina. Your Dragon-Types will be murdered (or even sometimes one-hit-killed) but that’s fine, just throw more Dragons at it. It’ll die eventually.

The battling though isn’t why Latias is a bitch. Latias falls the same way Palkia does. Slightly faster because you can actually use Ice-Types.

No, Latias is a bitch because it is a fucking bitch to catch.

You see, Legendaries are hard to catch and there’s often several reasons why. Pokemon like Lugia, Ho-Oh and the Legendary Birbs are hard to catch because they fly up and down a lot and tend to do so without warning, so you can throw a ball and miss simply because the bird in question floated upwards. Pokemon like MewTwo and Deoxys are hard to catch because they have fast attack animations that are kinda hard to predict. Pokemon like Giratina and Palkia are hard to hit because they are strangely further away than they seem, and you will probably waste a few balls getting that distance right. Then there are Pokemon like the Regi’s, which are slow and don’t do much but they just have shitty low catch rates, so you throw Pokeballs at them, get your Great and Excellent Throws and they just repeatedly pop out of their balls, there’s fuck all you can do about it but feed them more berries. And then there’s tiny Pokemon like Mew, Celebi and Meltan who are all really fucking tiny. As we all know, a smaller target is harder to hit.

Latias combines ALL OF THOSE difficulties into one fucking Pokemon.

Latias will fly up and down at random. Latias will suddenly attack (and has a really long attack animation, making you wait longer). Latias is small and hard to hit. Latias is further away than it seems. AND Latias has a low catch rate!

I kid you not, after I managed to start getting the distances right, I was getting hit after hit and Latias still just explodes out of its Pokeball.

I thought Palkia was bad, but at least Palkia is in charge of a whole different dimension so its power and difficulty to catch makes sense, and it’s still a big Pokemon, it’s just far away. Latias though is a fucking bitch who refuses to sit its ass down and stay in its ball.

So yeah, fuck Latias.

And you know what the sad thing is? Latios is apparently stronger than Latias. Which means it’ll probably be even harder to catch.