GO Fest 2023 – Day 2
Day Two of GO Fest is always a bit more relaxed compared to day one. Mostly. While day one mostly focused on Diancie and collection challenges, day two focused on a lot more raids and featured Mega Rayquaza. Now, Mega Rayquaza is a pretty big thing. It’s so powerful that, in competitive Pokemon battling in the main games, Mega Rayquaza has to be banned. It’s hugely powerful and can completely nullify its weaknesses. In Pokemon GO, it’s not as powerful, but it still does an absolute ton of damage, to the point that it’s one of the most powerful Pokemon in the game.
But in order to get a Mega Rayquaza, you need to teach it Dragon Ascent. And to teach a Rayquaza the move Dragon Ascent, you need a meteorite. Anyone who logs in to Pokemon GO during GO Fest gets a small research which gives you a Meteorite, and people with tickets can get a second Meteorite via a second special research after completing the first. You can also very rarely get them at the end of a Mega Rayquaza raid but they’re insanely rare, to the point that you’d have to do 30+ raids for a chance of seeing one.
Once you have your meteorite, you can teach Rayquaza Dragon Ascent. While Mega Rayquaza is stupidly strong overall, Dragon Ascent is also a stupidly powerful move. It does damage similar to nuke moves like Solar Beam, while requiring far, far less energy. It’s strong enough that Rayquaza with Dragon Ascent alone makes it almost the best generalist damage dealer, just after shadow Mewtwo. On Mega Rayquaza, it’s even more insane. The only real balancing factor is that you need 400 mega energy for Rayquaza. But those who got the GO Fest ticket get 400 mega energy by completing the special research. Doing Mega Rayquaza raids gives you 60-90 mega energy depending on how quickly you beat the raid boss, meaning you only really need to do 5-6 raids to get enough to mega evolve.
Funnily enough though, not every raid was a Mega Rayquaza raid. We still got shadow Articuno and the two primals in tier 5 raids, Snorlax in tier 3 raids, Carbink in tier 2 raids and a selection of Klink, Pikachu and Goomy in tier 1 raids. Thankfully, Rayquaza, Groudon and Kyogre were all made easier to catch, to the point where you could use pinaps and successfully catch them. This finally allowed me to restock on golden rasberries. However, potions and revives from raids were heavily nerfed, and since Mega Rayquaza is a tough raid boss, I really got through my potions. Even with resistances, all of Mega Rayquaza’s moves hit like a truck, causing a lot of losses. Even dodging didn’t work that well, just because Rayquaza does that much damage. Doing Mega Rayquaza raids does require a good amount of players. We were comfortable finishing the raids with 6 accounts, but they were a massive drain on our resources. Luckily, we managed to invite a lot of people, especially since the 5-remote-raids-a-day thing was removed for GO Fest. The limit on remote raids is still retarded, but it was nice being able to do lots of raids and invite people. The biggest lobby we got was 17 players, which for a small area like this, is pretty impressive.
As for the rest of day two of GO Fest, aside from the raids, it’s actually pretty tame. All the Pokemon from the previous day’s biomes spawn randomly in the wild, and the shiny chance is still the same. If anything, I think the spawns were just as good as the biomes, but the only real difference is that you can’t focus on a single Pokemon, because the spawns are very varied. I mostly just chilled out and shiny-checked in between doing Rayquaza raids.
My shiny luck on day 2 was pretty good. I got three shiny Pikachus, a second Bellsprout and a Snover. But my biggest catch was a 98% shiny Rayquaza, which I powered up for a research task. I also managed to catch a 100% Onix from field research. So a pretty good day for me, especially since I only really played the first 3-4 hours. However, I didn’t finish the special research because I ran out of raid passes, and I need to win 5 more raids. I’ll just do that naturally over the next five days, probably.
Overall, I really enjoyed GO Fest. Was it worth €15? Eh, kinda. But I had a lot of fun, both catching and socializing, so I think it was worth it for me. I also have about 1000 mega energy for Rayquaza, so I’ll be testing him out soon.