The Curse Of Looking for Raids

I swear, every time I go out looking for raids, I can’t find any. But when I don’t want to do raids, there are plenty of them. The other day, I went out to play Pokemon GO with my brother, and we simply couldn’t find any raids. We tend to go out to do raids semi regularly, since we both play together. As of late, thanks to the Master Ball research, we’ve wanted to do more raids, thanks to the Win 60 Raids task in the timed research. While I managed to complete the research thanks to my location, my brother lives slightly further out of town and doesn’t have access to a lot of gyms, so weekend trips are how he manages to keep up. Unfortunately though, raids are completely random, and every time we go out, there never seems to be any raids.

What makes matters worse is that, when there are raids, half of them aren’t ones we want to do. As my brother picked me up, I checked the 7 local gyms, there were three raids. One was a Shadow 5* raid that would hatch in an hour. The other two were shadow 3* raids, which don’t have anything good in them. Shadow 3* raids have been a real pain in the butt since no one wants to do them. They are very difficult to solo, since they can get enraged, but can’t be subdued with purified gems unless you have another player. Stupidly, you can only use 5 purified gems per player in a raid, and a boss needs 8 purified gems in order to be subdued. Plus, who really wants a shadow Nidorino?

Campfire isn’t of much help either. Sometimes it flat out refuses to show raids. When we went out, I checked on Campfire and only saw one raid at Town Hall, a shadow 3* raid that hadn’t hatched yet. But as we arrived, it turned out there was a Shadow Lugia raid, freshly hatched just waiting to be done. We actually did the raid pretty easily, and my little account actually got a 100% Shadow Lugia. I got a 3* Lugia on my main account as well, which was also nice.

Really, Campfire does help a little bit, but no one uses it. While, yes, it does show most raids in a local area, unless you already have a massive amount of players who already play Pokemon GO, you just get crickets. I’ve had Campfire since it came out, and I’ve only seen one flare ever be used. And it was on a 1* shadow raid, which can easily be done solo. You can see where there are raids all over the place. But you often can’t actually do them, unless you’re looking for 1* raids. Or happen to have a brother who also wants to do raids. Or happen to have a second account. Frankly, having a second account can be a godsend. It opens up so many more possibilities when it comes to raids.

But even if you can do raids, most of the time, the available raids just aren’t interesting. Legendary raids and Mega raids require friends, but can also be hit-or-miss, especially with Genesect being back, and two of the three Swords of Justice not being very good. But 1* and 3* raids are also generally rather annoying as well. After all, there’s always like 2-3 bad Pokemon and one Pokemon you actually want, but the one you want is always the rarest. I wanted to do a Greavard raid for candy, but didn’t see a single one throughout the Halloween events.

Thing is, there’s not much you can do. All you can do is keep an eye out on raids and hope you get lucky.