I Really Enjoyed the Team Rocket Celebration Event

As you may recall, I love doing Team Rocket battles. It’s so much fun, beating on a grunt and their weirdly overpowered Pokemon. The fact that we can do these fights regularly has been great for pandemic-based playing. And the slower rotation of Team Rocket Leaders means i more easily got the shiny shadows I wanted. However, it wasn’t always quite enough. Four battles a day is alright, but I long for more.

The Team Rocket Celebration event kicked battling up too 100, with almost constant battles available.

Balloons every 2 hours!

That’s right, we got a Team Rocket fight every 2 hours. Which means you could get a Rocket Radar every other day. Combined with massively increased Pokestop spawns, actually getting a Rocket Radar a day was genuinely possible.

A bonus mini research task was also included that rewarded 2 Rocket Radars for beating 6 grunts. This was basically a buy-one-get-one-free scenario. Except the grunts were already free.

We also got a shakeup of both Grunt and leader shadow Pokemon!

After so long having the same old shadow Pokemon, some Grunts now have new teams! Anorith and Lileep are now potential bug and grass-type Pokemon, while Shadow Swinub’s evolution Mamoswine threatens to take dragon-based raids by storm. Spheal and Sealeo are both potential new shadows too, and Aron is the new one-candy purification Pokemon. I’ve also noticed a few returning faces: Sableye, Magmar and Exeggcute have all returned as potential shadow Pokemon as well.

However the Leaders got the big boosts. Sierra has Carvanha, Cliff has Aerodactyl and Arlo kicks both their asses with Beldum returning as a shadow Pokemon. Sierra’s team is a pushover again, but Cliff and Arlo do actually have good teams. Kinda. All three can roll a team that can be beaten by one Pokemon.

That being said, Aerodactyl is actually a pretty good first choice as well for Cliff, but it does hit pretty hard. One of Aerodactyl’s potential moves is Bite, and it hits like a truck. Thankfully though, you can stunlock the Aerodactyle with a Swampert with Muddy Water. Melmetal is also great because you both burn shields quickly and deal good damage. It’s not as terrifying as Sierra’s old double Lapras team, but it does pack a Punch. Arlo and Cliff both potentially have Gardevoir and Gallade as second Pokemon, and their Charm fast move will nuke most Pokemon if you’re not careful.

I didn’t care much about the spawns, except for Houndour.

This event was the first time I’d seen wild Houndours since Season of Celebration started. The Season of Celebration basically killed all my favourite spawns. It’s left me completely unable to get Houndour XL candy.

Unfortunately, despite Houndour being a fairly common spawn, I only managed to get about 40 XL Candy. I got super unlucky, regularly getting none, even on high CP Houndours. This is particularly upsetting because Houndour was weather-boosted for most of the even!

The other spawns were all… kinda meh. Another chance at shiny Skorupi is nice. But Koffing and Grimer are actually very common Season of Celebration cloudy weather spawns. Trubbush was also pretty common, and Stunky doesn’t have a shiny yet. Didn’t really need more of them. Golbat being a wild spawn is kinda nice for stardust, I guess. Raids however had some great Pokemon – Absol and Tyranitar both returned as 3-star raids, and extra Larvitar candy is always helpful.

Perfect for the medal.

Most importantly for me though, this event allowed me to make some progress on my Platinum Medal. 2000 Team Rocket fights seems like a lot, but I did over 100 fights in this event alone. I’m really hoping we get a similar event happening soon.

Really, the only thing this event was missing was the ability to remove Frustration. That feature was oddly not included, and would have been useful. That being said, it’s not like I have any Charge TMs available anyway. Would have been nice to see a Giovanni fight as well, but honestly that would have been extremely short-lived, considering how many grunts and leaders we fought.

9/10 event, would definitely beat up grunts again.