All Legendary Raids Should Be Like How They Were In GO Fest
Legendary Pokemon are a horrible pain to catch. You have just kicked a Legendary Pokemon’s arse and now you have to catch the bastard. A Pokemon which will flail and jump around like crazy, constantly jumping out of Pokeballs. And you can’t even use nanab berries to calm the Pokemon down. If you’re lucky, you can use razz berries, but 99% of the time, you’ll have to use the golden variant, or use silver pinaps.
This has been the way since, well, Legendaries first appeared in raids. They have always been a pain in the butt to catch. After every single Legendary raid, everyone spends ages trying to catch the Pokemon, sometimes using all their up to 20 Pokeballs and even then, some people will fail to catch the Legendary. This can waste a huge amount of (sometimes precious) time, and basically brings things like Wednesday Raid Hour to a standstill. It’s most notable on raid days and special events, when people are rushing to do as many raids as possible. On the Shadow Mewtwo Raid Day, catching Shadow Mewtwo took forever because, not only was he hard to catch, but he was also a Shadow Pokemon, and all Shadow Pokemon are a bit harder to catch because they CONSTANTLY jump around and try to attack you.
What makes matters worse is that a Premiere Ball is the same as a normal Pokeball. Who goes up to a Legendary and throws a basic Pokeball at it? In the main games, you can at least try to quick-catch with a Quick Ball, or you can use Ultra Balls, which have a higher catch chance. In Pokemon GO though, we’re using the most basic of Pokeballs.
However, there have been two events where Legendaries were made easier to catch. During GO Fest, the three Legendary Pokemon, Groudon, Kyogre and Rayquaza, were made much, much easier to catch. To the point that you could easily catch them with a pinap berry, rather than using golden razz berries. If you did use a golden razz berry, you were basically guaranteed a catch. This made doing raids so much more fun. The legendary raids during GO Fest were pretty tough, with the Primals and Mega Rayquaza doing huge amounts of damage and eating a chunk of revives and potions, so the fact that they were made easier to catch made the day so much better.
The only other time they did something similar, was actually early in 2023, when the Ultra Beasts invaded. We had a whole day of Ultra Beast raids. But instead of using normal Premiere Balls to catch these Pokemon, we were given Beast Balls. Pokeballs designed specifically to catch Ultra Beasts. With a group of friends, we worked together and did a TON of raids spurred on by the fact that no one had to spend ages catching Pokemon.
Really, catching the Pokemon at the end of a raid is the most tense and infuriating bit. If you fail to defeat a raid boss, you can generally just try again, assuming there is time to do so. Catching on the other hand, if you fuck it up, you don’t get another try, and your Pokemon is gone forever. Even with the Master Ball, there’s still a lot of stress when it comes to catching. And the majority of Legendary Pokemon can be a pain in the ass to catch. Mewtwo is an aggressive Pokemon who attacks a lot. Kyogre has a habit of drifting from side to side, Pokemon like Rayquaza float up and down. The Lake Trio are tiny and hard to hit, and some Pokemon, like Ho-Oh, float up and down whole also being right in your face.
I’m not saying that all Legendary Pokemon should be as easy to catch as they were during GO Fest, but some change ought to be made. Maybe we could make the Premiere Ball a tad more powerful, or give us more of them. Alternatively, make them almost as easy to catch as they were during GO Fest, but give us far fewer balls to catch them with. Either way, making Legendary Pokemon easier to catch would make everyone’s lives a bit better. And, heck, it’d probably make Niantic more money, since more people would do raids. It’s not a huge thing to ask for, just make Legendary Pokemon easier to catch.