Mega Garchomp Raid Day
November 11th featured the first Raid Day in a long time, involving a new Mega Pokemon, Mega Garchomp. While we did have a Gible Community Day a few years back, this event allowed us to finally Mega Evolve the Garchomps we’ve had for so long, as well as the chance to catch some more Garchomps. The Garchomps had a chance to be shiny, and you got up to 5 free raid passes by spinning gyms.
There were plenty of raids to be had. As a somewhat new feature, each raid would last 1 hour, and, after the raid ended, a new one would spawn. This meant you could do three raids per gym, if you waited for the full three hours. None of the raids had eggs, they immediately spawned as fully fledged Mega Garchomps as soon as the hour changed.
The raids were pretty easy. We had a pretty big group at first, with lots of invites, and were getting raids done in about 25 seconds. As the event dwindled on though and people ran out of passes, we had less and less players. But the last raid we did, with 6 people, was still finished in less than a minute. The trick was to use ice types, and Mamoswine here came in clutch. While I did use a Mega Rayquaza, I decided just to use my Shadow Mamoswine and two 100% normal Mamoswines (as well as two more Mamoswines and my Mega Rayquaza in the back), because they just dished out so much damage. But you could actually pretty easily do the raid with just normal Mamoswines, or by using dragon and fairy types.
What’s nice is the shiny chance was pretty good. We didn’t get weather boosted Garchomps, despite it being kinda windy, but pretty much everyone managed to get a shiny Garchomp. While the normal shiny is kinda lame, shiny Mega Garchomp goes a glorious shade of pink. The catch chances were also alright. You need to use golden berries, but it is definitely catch-able. However, shinies weren’t guaranteed on the first throw, you did actually need to try and hit them. I managed to catch three shinies, and caught one 96% IVs Garchomp, but I also managed to catch the 9/9/9 lowest stats possible Garchomp too. My second account managed a 98%, but no one in our group got a hundo.
As a bonus, I managed to get to level 45 during this event. I used a couple of Lucky Eggs, got Ultra Friends with a random person and made a bunch of new friends post-raid, thanks to the new feature where you can add people on the Achievements screen. I only just managed to beat my brother to level 45, mainly because I do way more Team Rocket fights than he does, and managed to complete the level 44 tasks more quickly than he did. He’ll probably beat me to level 46 though because he’s about a million experience ahead of me.
There is a massive problem though with this event. If you didn’t manage to complete 2-3 Mega Garchomp raids, that’s it, no Mega Garchomp for you. There’d otherwise be no way of getting Mega Garchomp energy outside of a tiny 3 hour event that people did definitely miss. However, it does seem that Mega Garchomp is still appearing sporadically in raids. Still, it sucks that there’s zero way to get a Mega without doing raids, so when Mega Garchomp does disappear, that’s it, it’ll be gone for a long time. Other annoyingly missing Megas are Absol and Kangaskhan, but they’re not the most useful ones around.
Still, with the 5 free raid passes (6 for me because I had one from Friday), it was a pretty good event. It’s a shame they don’t do these events more often, because they do bring out more players. I saw more players today than I’d seen in a while, even more than community days normally do.