The Sudden Ability To Somewhat Reliably Throw Pokeballs

When the special research tasks for Jirachi came out, there was a little bit of panic as one of the final tasks was listed as “Make three excellent throws in a row”. At the time, that seemed like a pretty difficult task, especially for a Pokemon that no one was going to realistically use in any form of combat, was guaranteed just to be for the Pokedex and in a special research quest that was actually incredibly easy, compared to the previous quests. Luckily, it was quickly discovered that the task was in fact just “Make three excellent throws”, a far, far easier task.

But I was still dreading this task, even though I no longer had to do excellent throws in a row. For ages, I have always been pretty unlucky when it comes to Pokeballs. I just can’t seem to get the timing right and so many Pokemon will jump or attack just as you try to throw your Pokeballs. This is less of an issue with Pokemon in the wild when you can force-feed Pokemon nanab berries to make them down and have way, way more Pokeballs to spend, but in raids, you really need to know when to throw and when to wait.

And of course, getting Excellent throws overall is somewhat tricky because you need to wait for the little coloured circle to be a specific size. But depending on the Pokemon, the size of that circle can vary greatly. I mean, the difference between getting an excellent throw on, for example, Rayquaza, Mesprit, Ponyta or Zigzagoon are absolutely huge. It’s a piece of cake on a Ponyta that will stand still for hours on end, a tad harder with Rayquaza as he attacks regularly, but Mesprit is very small and jumpy and Zigzagoons are smaller still.

So of course I was a tad worried. But when I finally got onto the Make Three Excellent Throws task… I managed all three on the way home from a raid I’d done. That task took me about 20 minutes, which is nearly as fast as the time it took for me to catch a Ditto in the Meltan quest. Clearly I was doing something right. Or something different.

That was when I realised that maybe I was slightly better at catching Pokemon. Slightly.

But since then, I have noticed just how many curved excellent throws I get now. At least one a day. Mostly by accident. Sure, I don’t often catch these Pokemon because Pansear is an ugly shithead of a Pokemon who is impossible to catch, but still I’m getting a lot more excellent throws. I’ve even managed to get streaks of excellent throws, and can do the Spinda research tasks (like “make five great curveball throws in a row”) with ease.

Sure, I’m still going through a ton of Pokeballs, but I’m also getting way more experience from better throws. And the only reason I nearly ran out of balls the other day was because of the boosted stardust event – with a Star Piece, I was getting nearly 1000 stardust on second evolutions like Cherrim! And we all know Cherrims are really fricking hard to actually catch.

All this being said though, I swear, every Legendary is now a lot easier to hit. Not easier to catch though. Legendary Pokemon like Mewtwo and Giratina Altered/Stompy Forme are now much closer to ‘the camera’, which means people with smaller phones can actually hit these bastards. And on top of that, the size of the screen of your device also plays a huge part in how easy it is to hit a Pokemon. A guy I know plays on a large tablet and gets excellent throws with ease.

Then again, my last two phones were practically the same size. So maybe I have just gotten better at catching Pokemon?