A Random Drifloon Research Event

I’ve clearly not been paying much attention to Pokemon Go, because we have yet another community research event! This event, slap-bang in the middle of the Halloween event, is all about Drifloon! Drifloon is a cute little Pokemon that kidnaps kids if they mistake it for a real balloon. It also has the most adorable yellow and blue shiny ever, so I’m surprised that I nearly forgot about this event!

Amazingly, I actually managed to get a shiny super early on. But since this research event also gives you lots of other cool rewards, it was still worth doing all of it.

The Catch Mastery Ghost event is basically the same as the Meowth event we had a while back.

Rather than just spawning tons of Pokemon in the wild, you also have research tasks that reward more of the featured Pokemon. In this case, we get some wild Drifloon spawns but also lots of tasks to catch Drifloon, as well as throwing tasks. Most stages are “catch X Drifloon” and “make X nice/great/excellent/curveball throws”, as well as some “use X berries to help catch Pokemon.”

Really, the hard part is catching Drifloons, since there’s not THAT many. Sure, they’re more common than normal, but there are plenty of other Halloween event spawns in the way.

That being said, the difficulty does spike, when you suddenly need Great Throws in a row. Luckily this is just the last two stages of the quest. And since you need 10 and 15 Drifloons respectively, you have plenty of time to practice. I recommend giving Nanabs to any Duskulls you see, since they spawn pretty regularly and have a nice large hitbox.

Not much different compared to the Meowth one.

Really, it works in exactly the same way. The only main difference is that, unlike the Meowth research, this research doesn’t loop. It’s 10 or so stages (I lost count, they’re very repetitive) and then you’re done. The Meowth one repeated, giving you a second chance at the Kanto and Galarian Meowths in the middle.

The rewards were quite different as well. Most of them were Drifloon, but you could also get Drifblim, Banette, Haunter, Dusclops and a costumed Gengar from this one. Out of all of those though, the only worthwhile one is the Gengar. It’s the only one that can be shiny. The others can all easily be evolved, thanks to the Halloween event’s double candy.

The real difficulty is having Pokeballs.

Between this research event, the Gengar research requiring 120 Pokemon caught and the huge amount of Pokemon needed for the Spooky Message Unmasked special research, that’s a LOT of Pokeballs. I’ve basically run out, and anyone who doesn’t live on top of a Pokestop is going to start feeling the pinch.

Seriously, these are a huge drain on Pokeballs. Especially the Dark Type task, since the most common Dark spawns are Murkrow, Stunky and Alolan Rattata, two of which have abysmal catch chances. Heck, even Drifloon has a pretty annoying catch rate, as well as being an annoyingly hard Pokemon to land excellent throws on.

I feel like they’ve kinda reduced shiny chances though…

To be fair, this isn’t a community day. But considering how many Drifloon you need to catch, I’d expect more shinies. My small level 30 account got two shinies but BOTH were wild catches, nothing to do with research. Brother failed to get ANY shinies on two separate accounts. Aside from my very first research task, I didn’t get any more either. On research alone, this is far, far worse than the Meowth event, where we found 4 between 4 accounts. And it’s astonishingly bad compared to the Minccino and Snubbull events.

Oh well. At least the other rewards are nice. Especially the Gengar. Because I don’t want to do Gengar raids (normal OR Mega) when we’ve got Darkrai around…