Guzzlord (and other Pokemon) Raid Day

It’s been a while since we’ve had a raid day. Five free raid passes, some cool Pokemon in raids and the occasional chance to grab a shiny. Well, I say that, but the Ultra Beast raid day didn’t have shiny Pokemon at all. It had a lot of different Pokemon. The main bunch of Ultra Beasts were out and attacking every gym they could find. We got all the Ultra Beasts aside from Stakatakka, Blacephalon Poiple and Naganadel, who I assume were all busy making pancakes at home or something.

They’re going to need those pancakes because…

Guzzlord everywhere

In Europe, the potential raid bosses were Nihilego, Guzzlord, Pheremosa and Kartana. However, the chance of one spawning at a gym, I don’t think it was quite 25-25-25-25. Felt like Guzzlord was by far the most common, followed by Kartana, then Pheromosa. We traveled to the area with the most gyms visible, about 11 of them. 6 of the gyms were for Guzzlords, we saw one Pheromosa and two Kartana raids, the rest being Nihilego.

Thing is, we’ve already had two weeks of Guzzlord and some time with Nihilego too. We should have had way more regionals…

I hate that I have to say that. The Ultra Beasts weren’t everywhere, they were regional. Different regions of the planet had different Pokemon. In the Northern Hemisphere, we got Kartana; in the Southern Hemisphere they had Celesteela. But the other Ultra Beasts were split by region too. An Ultra Beast per region for the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia. And these spawns had to fight against the flood of Guzzlords and Nihilegos that seemed to be everywhere.

The “Rare Pokemon will spawn nearby” feature is bollocks.

Similar to the post-community day raids, the Ultra Beast invasion had a gimmick where, after being a boss, rarer-than-normal Pokemon were supposed to spawn around that gym. I say “supposed” because it was barely noticeable. The feature worked weakly at a gym in a high density Pokemon area. Outside of that though? Oh, look. A Magmar. All we noticed were Magmar, Machoke and Scyther. But they were pretty uncommon. Minccino was supposed to have a high chance of spawning, AND a higher chance of being shiny, but I somehow failed to see a single one.

Unless you live somewhere absolutely filled with Pokemon, you just can’t see these rare spawns.

What saves this mess is the timed research

Thankfully, there are two things that saved this event. The first is the Beast Ball, which replaced premier balls for the raids. This meant that the Ultra Beasts could be caught very easily. To put it another way, I had 42 golden berries before the event, and ended up with about 80 golden berries, all unused. I just used Pinaps on them instead, and they caught no problem.

But the other massive thing is that this event came with timed research. The timed research was simple: 7 stages of winning raids, going from “win one raid” to “win 7 raids”. Doing so gave us encounters of ALL the currently available Ultra Beasts, all at level 15, so some can be used in PvP. So at least everyone had a chance to get all the Ultra Beasts for the Pokedex. Then again, I was lucky enough to be able to, since I have a steady group for raids. If you were playing solo, then this event wasn’t for you.

As raid days go, it was an okay one. Way, way too many Guzzlords though.