Tons of Useless Raids

The other day, in the three places across town that have 90% of all the city’s gyms, there were no interesting raids. None at all. So for the last few days, my free Raid Pass has gone unused. I’ll tell you what there were raids for though. Granbull. Four of them, in fact. Granbull, for those who can’t remember, is the final evolution of Snubbull, a small, pink clown dog Pokemon that spawns regularly whenever the weather is cloudy.

Now, Snubbull has a really nice shiny form. It looks adorable. Granbull’s shiny form is mediocre though, mostly because Granbull is just a big, pink dog with derpy fangs on it. So the fact that there’s Granbull raids around does sound interesting at first… until you remember that you can’t get shinies of evolved Pokemon. There’s only been a handful of times that you’ve been able to obtain shiny, evolved Pokemon – the old Gengar Raid event and a World Women’s Day event last year where you could get shiny Nidoqueen. Every other evolved shiny has come from a shiny little Pokemon.

There are other reasons why you might want to do a Granbull raid, but they’re not… great. Most of the Legendary raid bosses lately have been Dragon types. Latios, Giratina, Palkia, Latias and Dialga are all Dragon types. So in theory, Granbull, being a Fairy type, would be a good pick, right? No. Because Granbull doesn’t really do a lot of damage and its Fairy type moves are slow and deal very little damage. In Pokemon Go’s raid meta, you generally want as much damage as possible since you’re on a time limit. If you want a Pokemon that’s good for raids, especially Legendary ones, then Dragonite has recently reappeared in tier 4 raids.

Another reason might be that you might not have the Pokedex entry for Granbull, but frankly Snubbull is so common that it’s not too hard to get 50 candies and evolve one.

Another Pokemon that’s also not really worth raiding for is Houndoom. This is a little more weather-dependent since Houndour only really spawns in sunny weather, but it’s still a pretty common Pokemon that only requires 50 candy to evolve, and can spawn in far higher levels than you’d get in a raid.

On the flip side, doing a Gengar raid is great. Sure, you can’t get a shiny form of Gengar unless you evolve a Gastly or got one on the Gengar Raid Day, but Gengar’s a good, strong Pokemon. Except not so much currently against the current Legendary raid bosses which are all dragons. Still Gengar’s useful and far more worthy of your free pass.

Some Pokemon though, you’re only really doing them for a chance to get shiny ones. Absol and Mawile have been in the raid pool on and off for years but they don’t really have much use aside from looking cool.

There are other Pokemon that might be worth raiding for. For example, you need a lot of candy for Bagon’s evolutions, Piloswines give you 10 candy if you catch them with a Pinap and saves you 25 candy when trying to get Mamoswine and Snorunt being in raids gives you a good chance to get the elusive shiny form and a female Snorunt for Frosslass. These are all level 1-2 Pokemon, meaning you can do them solo. But even then, if you have the chance to do a solo raid, a Shinx raid is almost always better than any other level 1-2 raid simply because you can only get Shinx from raids or a tiny chance in eggs.

But that’s assuming that you get any of these raids spawning and that you have a squad capable of doing these raids. Level 4 raids always need at least one other player and while some level 3 raids can be done solo, but half the time there’s not even a raid you want to do.

Maybe it’s just me being picky. I’d like to think so. But when you have a limited number of raids you can do per day (unless you fork out a ton of money for premium raid passes all the time), it sucks having to make a decision to not do any raids even though you can do them.

After all, why waste a raid pass on doing a Drifloon raid or a Sableye when you could not do any raids, save your raid pass for tomorrow and maybe find a better raid to do?