Shadow Raids in Pokemon GO

To finish off Season 10: Rising Heroes, Pokemon GO now has Shadow Raids, where you can encounter Shadow Pokemon outside of Team Rocket pokestops and balloons. So are these raids any good? Or is it better to save your raid passes? There’s certainly a few decent raids to do.

1-star and 3-star raids

There are currently three types of Shadow Raid. We have 1-star raids which include Bellsprout, Poliwag and Beldum. These 1-star raids work exactly the same as normal raids, except Team GO Rocket have covered everything with their R logo. You don’t need to do anything special for 1-star raids, and they have the same low amount of health. Anyone with a handful of super effective Pokemon can easily do 1-star raids. In the case of a Shadow Beldum raid, it’s almost impossible to fuck it up, since Beldum’s charge attack is Struggle, which does pretty much nothing.

3-star raids however are a little different. While the raid starts off normal, when the boss reaches about 50-60% of its health, the boss becomes Enraged. This causes it to do 20% more damage and gives it a ton of extra defense, which slows down the raid. The enraged boss glows with a cool purple hue, and lasts until it is either defeated or subdued. This does make killing 3-star raids harder, and you do need a strong team to solo them. Subduing the raid boss isn’t too difficult, you just need to feed it purifying gems.

But where do you get these purifying gems?

Shards and Gems

Now, as well as Mysterious Components, Team GO Rocket grunts also drop shadow shards. Collect 4 shadow shards and you can combine them into a purifying gem, which you can then use during a Shadow Raid. Using 8 purified gems is enough to subdue an enraged raid boss, and they return back to normal. However, these gems seem to do absolutely nothing until someone uses an 8th purified gem. Which, if you’re in a small group, can quickly dry up your supply of gems.

Luckily, shadow shards are quite easy to come by. Team Rocket grunts drop one shard after they are defeated, while Team Rocket leaders drop three shards. You are also guaranteed a handful of shards by doing shadow raids.

And then there’s Mewtwo

Amazingly, we almost immediately got one of the best Pokemon in Pokemon GO. For the weekend of the 27th and 28th, Shadow Mewtwo appeared in 5-star shadow raids. These raids worked just like the 3-star raids, but with a raid boss that hits like a nuke. People worried that one of the strongest Pokemon around would be too difficult to beat, needing way more people than normal. Luckily, Shadow Mewtwo turned out to be easier than predicted, and some insane people on r/thesilphroad managed to duo a Mewtwo raid. As for me, I was in a comfortable party with 6 accounts, and we beat Mewtwo pretty easily. Needed a lot of revives, but it was doable.

Amusingly though, most of the time, we just powered through the enraged phase. It did slow things down a little, but it didn’t feel like it was hindering us very much. Again, there seemed to be no difference what so ever until we used 8 purifying gems total. But even then, the boss would subdue itself at about 10% health.

The Mewtwo raids however were pretty inconsistent. They weren’t nearly as common as we’d hoped, and we only managed to do a handful of raids. Amazingly, my brother got three shiny shadow Mewtwos. and I got a shadow Mewtwo with good stats.

Overall though, the raids themselves weren’t really anything special. It’s just a normal raid with a dumb secondary mechanic that large parties could ignore. On the plus side at least, we did get some awesome Pokemon out of these raids…