Making More Use of Our Mega Pokemon

When Mega Pokemon first appeared in Pokemon GO, no one was particularly happy. Mega Pokemon were expensive to obtain and required doing raid battles for Pokemon most people already had. All for a handful of candy and 4 hours of one Mega Pokemon. Over time though, Mega Pokemon have slowly gotten better and better. The costs for evolving a Mega dropped, we got 8 hours of Mega time instead of 4, and new ways of getting Mega Candy were added, so you didn’t need to do constant raids.

However, with the release of Mega Latias and Mega Latios, we’ve received some nice new shiny additions to the Mega Pokemon.

Somewhat like Buddy Pokemon, Mega Pokemon have levels that upgrade the more times you use a Mega Pokemon, costs have gone down significantly and you can actually Mega Evolve a Pokemon for free! Once you’ve done that first initial evolution, you can Mega Evolve later on for a cost of 0 candies. This does have a cooldown of 7 days though. Luckily, if you do need a Mega Pokemon again, you can Mega Evolve again for a small amount of Mega Candy. But this means you can more reliably get to use Megas and not worry about running out of candy.

Really, the only challenging part now is getting people to do Mega Raids. Most people though only do enough raids to get that initial expensive first evolution. But with Latias and Latios, getting a legendary Pokemon with a special move has helped a lot, as there’s stuff for everyone to chase after, not just people looking for candy.

Legendary Megas are tough.

The only downside is that the legendary Mega Pokemon are very, very bulky. Mega Latias can easily chew through teams with Charm, while Mega Latios with Dragon Claw does large, recurring damage. Legendary Mega Raids are genuinely difficult, and we need 5-6 players to take them down. Sure, if you have a bunch of level 40+ accounts with powered up counters, then the raid is definitely doable with 4 players.

Locally, though, not everyone has 4 strong accounts, so we have to make do with three strong accounts, one semi-okay account and anyone else we can drag in. Remote Passes do help, but these raid bosses are genuinely worthy of the 6-star rating. Even then though, both raids are still very long. Mega Latias in particular takes a LONG time to go down, because it has so much health.

To put this into perspective, most Legendary raids are at about 40,000 CP. Mega Latios on the other hand is CP 84,000 CP, more than double a normal raid boss. Mega Latias isn’t too far behind.

Good candy!

Thankfully though, the rewards for legendary Mega Raids are actually kinda good. Actually, I take that back. Mega Raids have weird item drops on completion. The Mega Latios and Mega Latias raids we did felt a bit stingy when it comes to normal rewards. But they did drop PLENTY of Mega Candy. I did two Latios mega raids and got 400 Mega Candy from them in total, enough for a first initial evolution.

Now that we’ve also now glimpsed into what Mega Legendary Raids are like, we can somewhat safely assume that Mewtwo and Rayquaza’s Megas will probably work the same way.

Overall, good changes.

The whole Mega candy system isn’t perfect, and you are still basically hiring a Mega Pokemon for 8 hours. But at least the costs are far lower than they used to be.