How I’d Improve Shadow Raids in Pokemon GO

Shadow Raids are exactly that: raids but with Shadow Pokemon. These raids vary between being very hard to very difficult, especially if you do Shadow Legendary Raids. However, I think these raids, which are often ignored, could be improved. Here’s how I’d do it.

Stop making them angrier

When you do a Shadow Raid, if it’s a level 3 or level 5 raid, then the Pokemon you’re raiding against gets enraged. This means they do more damage and they also take less damage. There are two ways to subdue a Pokemon that’s enraged. You either throw purification gems at the raid boss, or you just power through the enraged state. But there’s a bit of a problem here. It takes 8 purification gems to stop a Pokemon from being enraged. But an individual player can only use 5 purification gems in a raid. So you HAVE to rely on another person to also throw gems at the raid boss.

Really, it’s easier to just power through, especially if you are trying to solo a level 3 raid. In fact, that’s your only option in a solo shadow raid. Even if you do use purification gems, you still need to get more.

The raids are already a bit harder because the raid bosses do more damage. Enraged mode is just a nuisance

Get rid of the purification gems entirely

There shouldn’t even be a reason why shadow shards and purification gems should exist. It’s just something used to draw out raids and make them take longer. They are also an additional something that you need to grind for. We already have to grind Team Rocket battles to get mysterious components to make Rocket Radars, there’s no reason for us to also have grind for shadow shards.

And, frankly, they’re a pain in the ass if you want to do lots of shadow raids. While a shadow raid does reward you with shadow shards to be turned into gems, you can only hold a maximum of 10-ish purification gems, so you can’t stack them up in advance, the same way you can with raid passes. You can accidentally get 11 or 12 gems if you are lucky and just happen to have enough shards, but the limit of 10 is still there.

So, really, we should just get rid of them. Especially if you can (or sometimes must) just power through a Pokemon’s rage state.

Rotate them more regularly

I think a similar issue is that, well, the raids don’t change much. Shadow raids for me lately have been mostly Meowth, Pineco, Gligar and Magmar, and they’ve been this way for a while. Originally, we had a whole month of Shadow Articuno on weekends, but they rotated it out and made Zapdos and Moltres only last two weeks. This kinda needs to happen with the level 1 and level 3 raids, otherwise they get very boring. And maybe make the shadow raids more even. I see way more Meowth and Gligar shadow raids than anything else and it’s annoying. At the same time, I have hardly seen Machop, to the point that I don’t even know if it’s in raids or not. Plus, shadow Meowth is pretty much worthless outside of the 500 stardust you get for catching it.

There’s one more thing, and that’s blocking the use of remote raid passes to do shadow raids. Shadow raids tend to need more players because they do more damage and become tanky in the middle of the battle. But not everyone has 20 nearby players in a big city ready to raid. While I’d love to be able to remote shadow raids, I don’t think Niantic will change this any time soon.

Yes, I am basically just saying to make shadow raids into normal raids. Because, most of the time, that’s exactly what they are. The little shadow additions are a nuisance more than anything else.