A Weird Gyarados Event

On October 8th, we had an event in Pokemon GO featuring Mega Gyarados. This was a raid event, in which every raid was a Mega Gyarados, with a higher chance of getting a shiny one. Everyone would get 5 free raid passes, and there was plenty of Mega Candy to be earned. But this event didn’t go as smoothly as everyone would have liked.

The event started early

At 11am, a Mega Gyarados spawned over the two new gyms near my home. Which was surprising, because the event was scheduled to start at 2pm. Turns out, Niantic started the event three hours early. As people got more and more confused, Niantic decided to just make it a six hour event. This was announced on Twitter, which I didn’t see until I looked at my phone, went to r/silphroad and saw the big announcement at the top of the page.

Then, at 2pm, all the Gyaradoses disappeared. They vanished for fifteen minutes, then abruptly reappeared at 2:15pm. I’m sure this was a glitch or something, but it was an opportunity for people to do more raids on gyms they’d already raided from. Which is great when you have limited gyms available to you.

The raid itself was pretty easy, at least for four people

The Mega Raids were all 4-star, meaning they’re slightly tougher, and not easily done solo. But with a team of 3 or 4, you can take Mega Gyarados down pretty easily. While normal Gyarados is doubly weak to electricity above all else, Mega Gyarados is actually a water/dark type, and can be punched in the face by a bunch of fighting types. I’d hoped that the weather would be sunny, so we could use our Kartanas under a weather boost, but instead it flip-flopped between cloudy and partly cloudy, then remained partly cloudy until the end of the event.

As for fighting the Gyarados itself, it has so many fast and charge attacks that it was difficult to keep track of. One Gyarados we did only had dragon moves, another hit like a truck with Waterfall and Outrage. Which I really struggled to dodge.

Why Gyarados?

This was my biggest question. Gyarados actually gets featured quite a lot. But this raid event would have been better if it’d followed the spooky October theme and been something ghostly. Yeah, Mega Gyarados is a dark type, but dark types aren’t automatically spooky like ghost types were. This was a perfect opportunity to introduce some more Mega Pokemon, such as Mega Banette or Mega Sableye.

At least we got plenty of Mega Candy

I only did the five free raids, and I ended up with over a thousand Mega Candy for Gyarados. Which, frankly, is enough for a very long time. Doubly so because Gyarados earns Mega Candy quite easily, as a 1km Pokemon. I may not have gotten a shiny (we found one in 5 raids and four accounts) but that’s fine, I already have a shiny Gyarados, ready to Mega Evolve.

While this event was a bit bumpy, it was alright in the end.