Latias Is Still A Bitch

Back in February 2019, I wrote an article saying how Latias is a little bitch of a Pokemon that was a pain in the ass in a few different ways. That was a little under a year ago, and there’s been a few changes in that time. But is Latias still a bitch? Yes. Yes she is.

Just like last time the weird airplane dragon Pokemon appeared in raids, Latias popped out of nowhere, in the middle of an event and directly after an event with Ho-Oh and Lugia. The main difference this time is that Latias’s partner in crime, Latios, has also appeared alongside the little dragon plane Pokemon, and the other Legendary Pokemon that is appearing is Heatran. Heatran currently has a shiny available, so there is a desire for people to do Heatran raids as well, but from what I’ve seen over the last few days, Latios and Latias appear far more than Heatran does. They are only around for the weekend (and will have just stopped spawning when this article comes out) and probably won’t be available in Raids again for a while, especially since they were somewhat recently in weekly research breakthroughs.

But everything else about Latias is basically the same. Latios is a pretty tanky Pokemon that also has access to actually quite a few attacks. Like Dragon Claw, a normally pretty weak attack, but when in the hands of a raid boss with multiplied damage, will hurt a ton. There are, thankfully, more counters to Latias now: as well as Tyranitar and Gengar, we now have the likes of Origin Form Giratina and Rayquaza, as well as Salamence, who has been more readily available thanks to its community day and reappearance back in December. We also have the added bonus of being able to use Darkrai if you were playing in October, or even Gardevoir, since there’s now a fairy-type fast attack in the form of Charm.

Why is Latias a bitch though? Because she’s a bitch to catch.

Last year, when I was doing Latias raids, I thought I was just unlucky, that I wasn’t throwing properly and that I was messing up. Even though Latias has moved and is now not as far away as she used to be, she still flies up and down, she’s still really small and she attacks a lot. If you have a Great or better Buddy with you, they can’t actually help you catch Latias because Latias’s attack animation and hitbox move around so much that you most likely won’t hit her for the ball to be able to bounce back towards you and your buddy.

I swear though, I thought I was screwing up and that she was hard to hit. It turns out that Latias is just all-round hard to catch! I kid you not, I did a 16-account raid today and only half of us caught our Latiases (or whatever the plural of Latias is. Laties? Latioi?). No, it wasn’t because we were low level accounts, apart from one kid, we were all above level 30, yet so many of us still lost the Latias. We had the same issue with Latios as well, with only 2/3 of us catching the Pokemon. Both of these Pokemon will NOT stay in their Pokeballs. Latios is a slightly bigger target but he’s just as much a bitch as Latias is. Either way, both these assholes ate pretty much all my golden berries and some of my regular berries too.

And no, none of us got a shiny. In fact, the only person to get a shiny was the kid in a previous raid, despite spending his whole time kinda just letting his Pokemon get killed.

What’s even more annoying is that we didn’t even get the cute 5 minute raid timers like we normally do with multiple option level 5 raids. When the Legendary Beasts and Birds were around, we had 5 minute timers so we could see which Pokemon was which, rather than waiting an hour for a raid to hatch, only to see that it’s an Articuno that no one but me wants to do.

Oh well. Latios and Latias have buggered off now. We’ll have a little bit more time with Heatran, before moving on to something else. Hopefully Dialga and Palkia, but having moved them as close as Altered Form Giratina was last September…