Alolan Marowak Raid Day

We haven’t had a raid day in ages. This year, most raid events have been week-long events so you don’t need to go outside too much, for obvious reasons. Aside from GO Fest, the black and white dragons, Giratina and Darkrai, most of the raids we’ve had weren’t amazing. We had the legendary horses earlier this year, the legendary genies and the legendary birds a few weeks ago. All stuff that, really, you don’t need, because there are plenty of good Pokemon elsewhere.

Alolan Marowak is another Pokemon that no one really needs. It’s a rather glassy Pokemon that doesn’t reach particularly high CPs, but has a niche use in PvP. It’s also the first Raid Day we’ve had since the legendary beasts and Lapras last year. On Halloween, of all days.

“Why Alolan Marowak?”

Probably because it’s a ghost type. A fire type and a ghost type. A pretty cool combination, but not the first, since Litwick got there first. But Alolan Marowak fits the theme and looks cool. More importantly though, Alolan Marowak is also the perfect candidate for a raid event. While Alolan Marowak hits pretty damn hard and has access to fire and ghost moves, it’s not particularly tanky. Well, it is tanky, but not enough to matter. As a 3 star raid, you can solo it pretty easily, and in a large group, it goes down in seconds.

The best thing about Alolan Marowak though is that it has LOTS of weaknesses you can exploit. You can use water, rock or ground to defeat its fire typing, or throw Ghost and Dark Pokemon to kick its ghost side. This means you can use everything from the recently released Darkrai and Giratina to the Rock Wrecker Rhyperiors we got back in January. And everything in between. We are in the middle of an event that spawns Gastly everywhere, so at the very least you can use Gengar.

My party ended up consisting of Tyranitar, Giratina and Groudon, all 4* (because I wanted to flex). Nothing else after them mattered because Alolan Marowak goes down fast.

“Does it have a special move?”

Yes, actually. This Raid Day gave Alolan Marowak its signature move, Shadow Bone. As to how effective it is… well, it’s a move for PvP. Shadow Bone sadly doesn’t make Alolan Marowak usable in PvE, either raid battles or Team Rocket stuff. It simply doesn’t scale high enough, despite pretty good damage outputs. The amount of resources needed for making Alolan Marowak viable for raids is better spent on more hefty Pokemon.

That being said, Shadow Bone is a damn good move for PvP. It’s basically Shadow Ball except less damage but much cheaper to use, charging up way more quickly. Shadow Bone also has a 20% chance to debuff enemy defense. Combined with the ground move Bone Club, you end up with two fast-charging moves that cover most of your ground. Only a handful of Pokemon will be able to completely resist both.

(I don’t know why though, but the name Shadow Bone sounds like a euphemism for shagging in a dark corner in an alleyway or something…)

It was worth doing, even if all you did is grab the 3 free remote passes in the shop.

Niantic’s been weirdly both generous and stingy lately. They were giving out packs of 3 remote raid passes and dropped them down to one. But not only did this raid day give out the old 5 free orange passes, but 3 free raid passes too. This meant that people stuck at home could participate a little as well. Despite the fact that you only get 5 raid passes from the event, if you have an orange free pass already, you still get the 5 free raid passes, for a total of 6 raids.

Ideally though, it would have been better to make the orange daily passes work like remote raid passes. But free remote passes are too good to turn down. Even if you did what I did and saved them all for Lugia with Aeroblast.

For me, it was REALLY worth doing.

In all honestly, this raid day was nothing special, aside from a chance to get a shiny Alolan Marowak. Unfortunately for the circle of people I did this event with, I kinda stole all the shinies. I played with my brother and two friends (8 accounts between us, lol). Brother got one shiny on his little account. The others didn’t get any. I got zero shinies on my new little account. But, out of the 6 raids we did, I got 4 shiny Alolan Marowaks.

FOUR!

That’s insane. Okay, it’s probably just a fluke, the shiny chances are probably closer to 1/20, but that’s still insane.

So for me, this was a great event. Even if I don’t do PvP. For everyone else? Not so much.