On Luck and Catching

Just now, I saw a wild Hariyama. It was just sitting there, minding its own business, being a Pokemon and chilling out. Because I have a Hariyama I want to power up, I decided I was going to catch this wild Hariyama. Now, Hariyama is a big Pokemon. It’s big and wide. That means that it’s easy to get Excellent Throws on it. This Hariyama though refused to catch. I threw multiple Excellent Throws at this Hariyama, but it did not want to catch. It wasn’t even a particularly high CP either, so this was quite frustration. Until, that was, I flubbed a throw because the Hariyama jumped. I didn’t even manage a nice throw. But somehow, after three wriggles, that Hariyama caught. On a really lopsided throw with no bonus. I immediately checked its stats and deleted it out of frustration.

That Hariyama got me thinking. That sort of situation has happened to me a few times. Before the Hariyama, I was reminded of a Xerneas raid, where I caught it with a flubbed throw. Again, I had gotten lots of great and excellent throws, only for the Xerneas to be caught on, yes, another flubbed throw. Caused by an unexpected jump. This Xerneas annoyed me in particular because it had cost me a LOT of golden rasberries, and it wasn’t even a particularly good Xerneas. Sure, I could have used normal rasberries, but I didn’t want to lose the Xerneas, I wanted the candy for it.

After some more thought, I noticed that this was happening to me a lot. I’d land a Great or Excellent throw, the Pokemon would bust out, but a flub slow would catch them no problem. Of course, all of this is simply luck. Pokemon have a percentage chance to be caught, and sometimes that percentage chance just happens to roll in your favour, after several rolls not in your favour. There’s no real way to determine this, you just need to keep on trying for those excellent throws.

On the flip side of the luck scale, we have the critical or instant catch. Sometimes, completely at random, a Pokemon will instantly get caught inside a Pokeball, regardless of the ball, berry or throw used. Just like that, it’s yours. I’ve had some Legendary Pokemon caught that way, but I’ve also managed to get an instant catch on low CP trash Pokemon. Again, it’s completely random. There were rumours (mostly in my local community) that you could only get one instant catch a day, but that’s not true. It’s rare, but you can get more than one instant catch a day. I once managed to get three in a day, but that’s very hard to prove, since it’s so random.

Really though, you can’t rely on flub throws catching Pokemon. At least, not high level Pokemon. Excellent throws are the way to go, and you get way more xp from landing an excellent throw. It’s just frustrating when the game decides to ignore consistency and just catch whenever it wants to, rather than acknowledging skilled throws.

Then again, my sister once managed to catch a Mewtwo with only straight throws. So really, I guess anything is possible if you believe hard enough.