Some X-mas news

Some kind of Christmas event has started, and with it a few new things were added to the game.

You've probably already noticed some new pokemon. Filling out the dex is always fun.


Then we also have three new package deals.


Winter Box, 480 coins

• 2 incence
• 2 standard incubators
• 5 star piece

Great Box, 780 coins

• 4 super incubators
• 10 razz berries
• 10 star piece

Ultra Box, 1480 coins

• 8 super incubators
• 10 pinab berries
• 25 star piece
• 10 lure modules

Star piece? According to this piece of news it's a consumable item that lasts for 30 minutes and increases star dust gain by 50% for that period. I'm unclear if it's an in-game shop only item or if they are distributed yb other means as well, like poke stops for example.

For the purpose of this post I'll assume that it's either a shop only, or at least a stupidly rare free item. In any case they are a very welcome addition to the game.

In that case the package deals have to be compared to each other. As usual I'll assign the berries an exactly zero value.

The Winter Box comes with 300 coins' worth of incubators and hence it's a matter if you think that 5 star pieces is worth more than 180 coins. I'd say it is, but I have difficulties assigning a value to them. We're talking two and a half hours with 50% extra star dust.

I'm not entirely convinced that this is indeed a good deal though.

For 780 coins the Great Box will yield 4 super incubators, which even if valued at 150 coins each is 600 coins worth of incubators. In this scenario the remaining 180 coins yields twice the amount of star pieces. Five hours with 50% extra star dust for 180 coins is a no-brainer.

This is a good deal aimed at the walking player.

The 1480 coin Ultra Box comes with 1200 coins' worth of super incubators, once again if we value them at 150 coins each. Basically anything thrown in after that is likely to push the package deal way above the remaining 280 coins.

In this case 10 lure modules is a little problematic. It's either a sweet 900:ish coins' worth of modules, but at the other hand a lot of players are wading around in those.

25 star pieces, at the other hand, is simply fantastic.

This package deal is also the best designed for long sessions of playing with the package as your only boost since 10 star pieces go hand in hand with 10 lure modules. This assuming that you're not the only one adding lures to poke stops. The remaining 15 star pieces are a perfect boost for consuming those eight super incubators.

I'd argue that this deal is superior to the other two by a very wide margin.

Oh, there are pokemon out there with a christmasy look as well. Just like last year.

Groudon, raid boss

A little late I'll have a look at the groudon raid boss.

There's already a perfectly good write-up on CP-stats even though it seems likely the real version is somewhat nerfed from those stats.

I'll stick to a quick analysis.


Beating the crap out of it

There are basically two answers -- gyarados and exeggutor. They come with comparable base attack stats, but gyardos wins out on better effective bulk due to a higher base defence stat which translates into its staying in the battle a little longer, all else equal.

You're running either a Waterfall / Hydro Pump or Bullet Seed / Solar Beam combo.


As groudon is ill suited to be a gym defender (had it been allowed to) you can more or less disregard its primary attacks. Mud Shot, while benefiting from a type bonus, is an offensive move, and Dragon Tail lacks the type bonus.

Mud Shot is ineffective against gyarados and exeggutor, while Dragon Tail at least deals neutral damage.

The charge attacks, however, are a totally different beast. Paradoxally enough the type bonused Earthquake is immediately neutered by being inefficient against both preferred attackers. This leaves us with two off-type attacks.

Fire Blast, which slaughters exeggutor, and Solar Beam, which slaughters, well, everything... Of these two attacks you'll still be happier if faced with Solar Beam. The sledgehammer is at least inefficient against both attackers despite gyarados being a water/flying type pokemon, and it takes until next month to finish casting.


Don't have enough gyarados and exeggutor? You can always fill out your line-up with vaporeon. However, Solar Beam is to vaporeon what Fire Blast is to exeggutor -- insta kill.


Why would I want a groudon?

It's a pure ground type pokemon, so let's run a quick matchup versus rhydon.

Both pokemon come with Earthquake as the preferred charge attack, so we're comparing Mud Shot with Mud Slap. Mud Shot deals substantially less damage, is faster to cast and pumps up Earthquake faster.

The word 'best' is hard to define here since Earthquake is a single bar attack. If you can guarantee that you'll fire off more Earthquake due to the better energy handling from Mud Shot, then this is the better attack, but if the fight ends just prior to Earthquake going off, then the opposite stands true.


Remains to have a look at base attack. The non-nerfed version comes with 297 base attack versus rhydon's 222. It takes a lot of nerfing to bridge the 75 point gap, a lot more than what has been applied given the 2300:ish CP your level 20 raid boss comes with when it's caught.

In the end this indicates that groudon is a better rhydon than rhydon, and sine it's pure ground suffers from a much smaller range of super effective attacks against it. A minor added bonus is that nothing is doubly super effective against groudon, but to be honest, if you attack with ground or rock into grass or water you deserve to deplete your potions and revives.

It's all about cloudy weather

The current meta makes cloudy weather your best friend. Both because your machamps hack through gyms at a higher speed, but also because machops spawn at a brutal rate.

This is your chance to get three top tier machamps to use against gyms, because machamps rule the offensive game right now.

Out of the preferred gym defenders the following are weak against machamp:

• blissey
• chansey
• snorlax
• lapras
• steelix
• umbreon

So get out there and build your line-up with the game's mst important attacker.

Gyarados is king

At least as a water type attacker.

If the info provided here can be trusted we can compare gyarados to vaporeon or other water type attackers.


Gyarados suffered badly from lacking a water type primary attack. With gen3 comes Waterfall. The 16 power corresponds with what the game says, and 16 dps implies the attack goes off once per second.

That's quite simply brutal.


To mitigate this the rather monstrous primary comes with an eps that is rather atrocious. You're doing fifteen rather attacks before you get to fire off that Hydro Pump. Fifteen seconds versus vaporeon's ten seconds with Water Gun.


So it boils down to 10 (Water Gun) dps or 16 (Waterfall).


In a hypothetical battle vaporeon fires off three Water Gun every half a minute versus gyarados' two. Well, almost. You have to add the 9.9 seconds to cast those three charge attacks and reduce the 6.6 seconds for the gyardos, which allows your gyarados to squeeze in another three Waterfall attacks and a tiny bit of energy.


It also takes 40 seconds, and if you're fighting anything for 40 seconds with a surviving gyarados you're doing something seriosusly wrong. But anyway, just to compare numbers.


Our hypothetical vaporeon fired off a bonus Hydro Pump for 130 power. Deduct 32 for the two extra Waterfall. Let's call it 100 power in favour of vaporeon.


After that we compare six dps difference for thirty seconds (16 versus 10). That's 180 power in favour of gyarados.


80 extra power for the gyarados. If gyarados and vaporeon shared the same base attack stat. They don't. Vaporeon comes with 205 base attack stat and gyarados with 237. 32 base attack difference is a fifteen percent difference.


As an attacker gyarados wins out both in terms of the attacks available and the base attack stat. The only remaining advantage that vaporeon retains is that it's not a reliant on dodging a big incoming attack as the gyarados. After fourteen tedious Waterfall you really, really, really want to fire off that Hydro Pump.


Eh, blogging guy, didn't you just forget to compare with other water type attackers?

Yeah, I did. Show me one with more than 237 base attack stat and I'll rerun my numbers.


Conclusion: Have fun out there. Fast TM your gyarados and don't forget to Charge TM your old Hydro Pump vaporeon attackers -- they're perfectly good as gym defenders with either of the two other charge attacks.

Battle parties

It took me a while, with not so little help from people around me, to understand how the new battle parties work.

Clicking up the pokemon interface you now have three headers instead of two. The uppermost left gives you the opportunity to predefine up to five parties.

Just test it out. There are a few interface glitches, but after some swearing you'll have yourself a party or two.

Nota bene, you can't add a fainted pokemon into a party.


Now what? I have my nifty party for attacking gyms and another for ho oh raids.


I haven't tried this for boss raids, but I've tested it for normal gym combat. After you decide to fight the gym you're faced with the usual inane pick that the game makes of you. Swipe to the left and your predefined parties will turn up in the reverse order you created them in.


No more digging up the fighting type pokemon you want for almost every gym you encounter.

New combat interface

The last update came with a few news. Well, generation three among them, but this short post will focus on the new combat interface.


Attack a gym or join a raid boss fight.

Tap tap tap press.

Feel familiar?


It's gone.


From now on the charge attack kicks in when you tap the circle at the very bottom of your screen.


My first impression was that the change was a huge boost to my kamikaze play style, but that it came at a cost for the player who make an attempt at dodging attacks due to the need of split vision.

Thanks to a comment from a fellow player I learned that I was wrong. Just tap that symbol throughout the fight and the charge attack will go off as soon as it's charged. You can concentrate on dodging whatever.


Now, there's never a change without a cost. In this case it's the opportunity cost, but it's simple enough to handle. Sure, it requires you to throw the occasional glance at the bottom of your screen, but only when you would have checked out the energy bar anyway.

Whenever you feel the need to save that charge attack sledgehammer for later, just move your tapping finger higher up on your screen and you can overcharge your energy bar to save that juicy attack for the next target in line. Or for enabling you to dodge that nasty attack if that's what you want.


Overall this is good news for attacking into gyms or cutting down that raid boss to size.

Ho oh, raid boss

So we have a new legendary bird visiting us for a couple of weeks. Bye bye December 12.

If the attacks available for this flying/fire pokemon are those stated on PokemonDB, then this bird becomes naught but a decks filler.

No fire/flying primary means lower damage done against neutral defence. Add that Extrasensory and Steel Wing aren't exactly the sweetest attacks to begin with.

If the primaries are poor, then perhaps we can mitigate that problem with good charge attacks. Brave Bird and Fire Blast are type matched with ho oh, but Brave Bird is a bad joke of a one bar attack with its atrocious 90 power. Fire Blast comes with 140 power, which is decent.

But...

Notice the available combination Extrasensory and Solar Beam? Damagewise it's in the same ball park as Extrasensory and Fire Blast. While 1.2 times 1.4 (type bonus applied to Fire Blast's power) is 168 compared to Solar Beam's 180, Solar Beam comes with a 0.7 second longer cast time with its associated opportunity cost. For all practical purposes you coud argue that the damage output from ho oh is the same with both attacks against a neutral target.

Still... there's something familiar with that combination...

Yep, that's your trusty exeggutor for those of you who want it as a general attacker. Most sane players would run their exeggutor with single grass attacks since dragonite is a better pick for a general attacker anyway, but let's compare ho oh with an exeggutor running the same attacks.

Exeggutor comes with a 233 base attack, and unless the in-game version of ho oh has been nerfed to kingdom come, ho oh comes with a 263 base attack. Exceggutor receives a type bonus for both attacks, and ho oh doesn't. In effect we can multiply that 233 base attack stat with 1.2 for a result of aproximatgely 280.

Congarulations, getting a ho oh won you a worse version of an Extrasensory / Solar Beam exeggutor. Sure, a tankier version, but still. And you shouldn't rig your exeggutor with Extrasensory in the first place.


Oh well, but I still want one, so how to beat it up?

Well, it's a flying/fire type pokemon. Remind you of something?

Moltres.

It's time to bring out your golem again. Splash out with rock-attack omastars and Stone Edge tyranitar. Add vaporeon last in your line-up if you run out of attackers.

Oh, and don't expect as easy a ride as you experienced with moltres. Ho oh tanks a lot better, and neither your golem nor your tyranitar is going to smile if the raid boss comes with Steel Wing. While it might be a bloody awful primary attack when you're the one attacking into a gym, it's still a perfectly valid defensive attack. Oh, and it's super effective against rock type pokemon, so the lack of a 1.2 type bonus multiplier for ho oh is replaced by a 1.4 times attack bonus against your golem/tyranitar.

The Extrasensory version will have your tyranitar take absolutely no damage at all until it's time for the charge attack. Instead of a 100% chance of a non-effective charge attack as was the case with moltres you're seeing a 66% chance.

Solar Beam represents the remaining 33%. A 180 power, super effective against rock and water type pokemon charge attack is likely to one-shot just about anything that you bring to the fight.


All data in this post taken from PokemonGoDB. I have yet to fight this legendary raid boss myself. Sometimes reality becomes, well, too real. Come this weekend I plan to spend some extra raid passes to make up for it.

New raid boss, new pokemon level

So something did indeed happen that was worth mentioning.

First of all ho oh is available as a legendary raid boss. This lasts until December 12 and requires no EX raid pass.


Secondly, and in the long run more important, pokemon max level has been increased from 39 to 40.

The last two clicks cost a whopping 10000 stardust and 15 candy each, and they yield the same half-rate increase in CP as every click above level 30.


Lastly it's worth mentioning that we're still receiving double XP and stardust for catching pokemon, and if you had a maxed out line-up, catching pokemon is what you want to do.

The near future

So this post will be all about guesstimates.


Today is likely the last day of the event. It's possible that the rewards will linger on for a short period since players would have been more than just merely grumpy had we hit three billion mons caught with ten minutes left to find and catch the regional reward.

Well, it's Niantic we're talking about. Making players grumpy hasn't deterred them before.


With November heading towards a close we'll see raikou drop out from raids soon. Starting December 1 we should see a new legendary or a rehash of the old ones.


Niantic stated four big updates during this year. Three of them have occured, and the only remaining one is generation three arriving for real. I expect that to happen within the week.


EX raids should be available for more players pretty soon. I'm not saying they'll be widely available, but at least the atrocious distribution should vanish.

While most of us will wait for our first mewtwo raid a select number of players, possibly highly localised, should receive invites for ho oh ex raids. Maybe not within the week, but probably before 2018 hits us.

Event, update

Since an hour or so ago I'm receiving double stardust for everything. That's an indirect indicator that we've reached 1.5 billion pokemon caught.

So, now we're running the following benefits:

• double XP
• double stardust
• six hour lures
• increased spawns, increment number two

I'm unclear about how much the spawns have increased since the insertion of both spawn-additions during the event, but there are definitely more pokemon to throw balls at disregarding the added number of active lures.

For the high level player this means we've reached the real target. Sure, at 3 billion pokemon caught we get to throw poke balls at a regional pokemon normally not available where we play, but that will get old pretty soon.

Those of you still heading towards level 40, use the coming weekend, and if you're inclined to speed up the XP you gain, then do buy the package deals. It's hard to go wrong with four times the XP gained when you evolve away the crap you'll be getting tons of.

A legendary raid with a lucky egg active is 40k instant XP. Two of those raids close to each other is a no-brainer.

For the rest of us -- just enjoy the stardust bonanza. Six hour lures, increased spawns and double stardust is a huge bonus.

Oh, and this is where you start giving them super incubators a greedy look. Remember, double XP and double stardust. At least slot in ten kilometre eggs inside. You can't go wrong with upwards to 5k dust for walking 6.7 kilometres.


Extra update: If you're worried about the 3500 max pokemon caught during a week -softban, use the added spawns as an opportunity to boss raid and catch pokemon. Normally boss raiding is a huge wrench in your plans to grind stardust during an event like this, but now you should be able to do both.

New event

This one is a  bit odd.

For a week we have to catch as many pokemon as possible. At half a billion, which we have already reached, a double XP bonus for everyone is unlocked as well as more spawn points. Those of you who throw lure modules around you will notice that they stay for six hours.

When we hit 1.5 billion pokemon caught double stardust will unlock as well as even more spawn points.

At 3 billion farfetched will start spawning outside the East Asia region, and they in turn will see kangashkan pop up.


As it is an event, there's the usual package deals.

The smallest one is just one item. At 200 coins you can shop one of the super incubators. If you're wading in coins, go bonkers. For the rest of us this one is a little iffy. While it certainly pops its content quicker than the regular incubator, do you collect enough 10 km eggs to merit the extra 50 coins for faster hatching?


Then there is a Special Box

• 380 coins
• 20 great ball
• 6 lucky egg
• 1 premium raid pass
• 4 lure module

If you've yet to hit 40 and want them XP at a limited budget. Go for it! You're getting 8 lucky eggs at standard price. The extra raid and lure modules are for free. The great balls? Well, I guess you can throw them after something that pops up at a lure near you.

And we have an Ultra Box

• 880 coins
• 16 lucky egg
• 4 premium raid pass
• 8 lure modules
• 30 ultra ball

Once again a deal geared towards players hunting XP. You're basically getting 16 lucky eggs at standard price without having to give up 25 slots, ie the cost should be compared to the 25 lucky egg bundle. This yields you 4 raid passes and 8 lure modules free.

It's a better deal but not a fantastically much better deal.

For players like me? The package deals are utter crap. Not only do I have to shell out coins, but after than I'm forced to manually discard the lucky eggs. So, once again -- if you don't need the lucky eggs, the package deals are shite.

Well, maybe with the exception for the super incubator, possibly.

Balancing gym material, bag management

No, I'm not dead yet. There just hasn't been much meriting a post lately.

Since the change in item-ratio from stops people once again have problems handling gym battles.

There are two simple methods alleviating this problem.

• balance pots and revives
• show preference to gyms

A third, but expensive, one is to participate a lot in boss-raids.

I'll primarily stick to the the first two ones.

Despite feeling the lack of potions and revives, in the end most players are lacking in one departement. Basically the problem is mostly either a lack of potions or a lack of revives.

Potions

When your problem is a lack of potions, which is the most common one, then make certain you get your attacking pokemon downed. And I really mean this. It's a perfectly valid tactics to stack almost downed pokemon for an attack to make certain they go down. Sure, drop an anchor at the end to ensure you see the defender go down.

Now you have a bunch of downed pokemon.

Do not heal them. Just revive and attack again. This way you'll go through your revives without touching your potions.

There's a side twitch to this scenario. As you're attacking with half healed pokemon you'd better start taking notes on defender weaknesses as your attacking pokemon are going down at worse than twice the ratio for fully healed pokemon. This is the result of receiving more charge attacks compared to the ratio at which you're able to use them yourself. Each pokemon going down is replaced by another half healed one with energy at zero.

Revives

Out of revives but have access to potions?

Change your gaming style when attacking to one where you swap pokemon before they go down. After you've gone deep enough into the gym to leave battle (could very well be going right through it) then exit the gym entirely and heal up your pokemon.

You'll eat through you stash of potions at an amazing rate but revives should be left unused.

Gyms

Since the change in ratio you really shouldn't have any massive problems with poke-balls to throw at the critters in the wild.

If you can afford it, then skip spinning pokestops and concentrate on spinning gyms. They yield a far better ratio of revives and potions compared to stops. There's very little use for more balls when you're hunting gyms.

This is where getting that gold badge comes into use. Focus your gym battling to a select number of gyms to speed up your badge-XP in order to receive more items from those gyms whenever you spin them.

Boss raids

Whenever you're running dry on gym material, if at all possible, skip low number of players boss raids.

Hit raids at gyms of your own colour if you have that option.

Learn the best setup you can muster. The number of balls you receive corresponds directly to the number of potions and revives that boss-fight will yield.

Two item per stop idiocy finished

After two weeks with resources from pokestops cut by a third it's back to normal again. As of now the affected minority of players is no longer discriminated.

Notably Niantic hasn't admitted that anything happened in the first place, so rather obviously they didn't confirm it has been fixed.

Counting on a large community of players to be incapable of noticing patterns, however, is a very dangerous thing to do for a company that relies on a single product for its survival.

With their latest stunt more or less any remnant of trust in Niantic customer transparency has gone out the window. It'll take a very long time, if ever, to regain that kind of lost goodwill.

To make things worse Niantic timed this idiocy with the release of a rip-off game. That market competitor couldn't possibly have created a better marketing event themselves.

Halloween event, package deals

This event comes with the three package deal boxes we've come to be accustomed to since summer.

Special Box:

• 480 coins
• 5 Incense
• 6 Premium raid pass
• 10 Pinab berry

Great Box:

• 780 coins
• 7 Incense
• 4 Super incubator
• 3 Premium raid pass
• 10 Razz berry

Ultra Box:

• 1480 coins
• 12 Incense
• 6 Super incubator
• 6 Lucky egg
• 6 Premium raid pass

These deals have different customers.

The Special Box is definitely for the boss raider. 600 coins' worth of value in raid passes for 480 coins mean's you're getting a good deal even if you chose to trash everything else in the box. The berries have zero value, but a rural area player should value five incense at better than zero value. For large city players incense is only useful for use with PoGo Plus when traveling with slow going mass transport.

The Great Box yields 300 coins' worth of raid passes. Add 600 coins' worth of incubators and you once again have a perfectly valid deal for a box that costs 780 coins. As usual the berries have zero value, and the usefulness of the seven incense depends on your playing environment.

The Ultra Box is more problematic. 600 coins' worth of raid passes and 900 coins' worth of incubators. The box comes at a 1480 coins cost. While it doesn't contain any pointless berries the value of the box is highly dependent on player context.

Six lucky egg -- do you want xp?

12 incense -- where do you live?

Depending on your answer this package deal is iffy at worst and a fantastic deal at best.

For the walking boss raider I'd recommend the Great Box unless you have good use for the incense.

If you plan to power evolve for XP during the event the the Ultra Box is a no brainer. Double candy enables you to evolve pidgeys over and over and over again.

Niantic, taking incompetence to the next level, part three

Eh...

As in, really? Are you for real?


Hello,
We'd love to hear what you think of our customer service. Please take a moment to answer one simple question by clicking either link below:

How would you rate the support you received?

Good, I'm satisfied

Bad, I'm unsatisfied

From a strictly semantic point of view I'm actually unable to respond. An automated canned reply doesn't constitute support, and hence I'm not qualified to rate the support I never received...

New event, Halloween

And another event is upon us.

I'll just refer to Pokemon Go Hub as reference.


October 20 to November 2. That's a pretty brutal stretch. And, yeah, it starts tomorrow.

What's the hype? Let's start with the big news.

We're getting a taste of Gen3. Five new ghost type pokemon to be hunted down. Good mons or not, they're at least new.


Then there's the usual fringe benefits. In this case:

• Buddy distance cut in half
• Double candy for catching pokeomn
• Double candy for hatching eggs
• Double candy from transferring pokemon

Halloween special pikachu, a new hat for your avatar and some kind package deals in the shop containing raid passes and super incubators.

Niantic, taking incompetence to the next level, part two

There is now a level zero...

Let's have a look at their support function:

Your request (25958693) has been updated. To add additional comments, reply to this email.

Blake (Pokémon GO) Oct 18, 4:28 AM IST Hello Trainer, Thanks for writing in. At times you may notice changes to existing features as well as the addition of new features. Please note that the items received at PokéStops may vary. We appreciate you taking the time to share your feedback. We'll be sure to pass it along to the team. Best Regards, Blake Niantic Support

Stenduring Oct 18, 1:42 AM IST Getting a baseline of two items from stops rather than the normal three. Also translates into ten stop streaks awarding four rather than six items. Gyms work as normal.

Whenever you're drowning in support requests concerning the same problem that you currently don't know how to handle, then returning a canned reply as your first contact with the customer is perfectly understandable.

However, no sane company creates an illusion of an escalation process and then blithely proceeds to send out canned replies. That's basically stating that 'sorry, but we can't find our arses in the dark, so you shouldn't expect us to actually read your support requests in the first place'.

Gym battles, autumn weather

As the temperatures drop the sudden influx of casual players become less visible. Most either outright leave the game or at least stay away from anything but legendary boss raids when the weather is bad.

For the high level, gym battling player it means we're back to maintaining some kind of territories again.

Apart from spoofers this game forces hard core players to accept whatever temperatures and cold rain is thrown at you. Those who are unwilling to do so will notice how their presence in gyms is diminished.

For the rest of us we'll see how attacks on gyms decline for two reasons:

• Piss poor weather keeps the casuals indoors to begin with
• If they brave the weather they're less inclined to do so when faced with a well built gym

Obviously high tarffic gyms will go down in the morning as defender motivation has gone down to nothing during the night, but you're more likely to stay in a gym you tore down during daytime provided that you slotted something nasty inside. Nasty currently defined as a big blissey. Big, in turn, starts at 2800 CP or so.

Note that berry feeding a gym works towards this goal Both when you walk past a friendly gym and use it as a trash can for standard berries, and when you defend a prime defender with golden razz berries.

The down side, if you want to see it as such, is that you're less likely to see friendly casuals drop defenders inside a gym you too mere minutes after the fact.

The up side is that you're less likely to see some crap in a friendly gym that you'll find somewhere in that players top five recent catches.

Niantic, taking incompetence to the next level

Pokemon Go displays not a few bugs. That is to be expected. Software tends to do that. However, in this case we're talking incompetence on an epic scale.

Epic scale here defined as the level at which a company normally would have valid reason to fire the culprits. At least if we were talking a decent company with at least a remnant of a quality policy.


Since the inception of boss raids the gym battling part of the game has been riddled by errors. Network error 2 and error 29. They disable you from succesfully attacking a gym, and the former is keyed to the fact that you won the last boss raid taking place at the gym.

We're not exactly talking rocket science when it comes to locating the bug. The same code that prevents you from joining a boss raid you have already won also prevents you from attacking the gym.

Niantic, however, have failed to do so since July.


Any software producer worth their salt tests their code before releasing it to the public. Any good software producer applies regression testing. It's just common sense. Basically it means that you make certain that what already worked before still works after you have made changes to the code. Changes normally meaning making the next release available to the public.

Let's have a look:

• Boss raid lobby allowed you to see everyone inside -- now broken
• Entering a gym didn't hang the game -- now broken
• Spinning a pokestop gave you a baseline of three items -- now (partially) broken
• Network error 2 left your failed attack with undamaged attackers -- now broken

When you hype up a new feature 'within the next few weeks', and have your customers spend extra money to take part of said feature, it usually a good habit to make the distinction between 'few weeks' and 'few months'. We're still waiting for Mewtwo.

When you utterly fail to create an event you're really not supposed to announce new events that have to be postponed just prior to the announced date. It does make you look like you're utterly unqualified to do events in the first place.

When applying balance tweaks to a game it's possible to apply changes that affect the game with less than a factor two to ten. Whenever you double or half an effect it's no longer called tweaking. We're not even going into cutting an effect by ten.

To summarize:

Niantic has access to a sales departement that works wonders. Some of that personel apparently do commersial programming as a hobby.

It shows.

Suicune, the line-up

I'm still getting questions about this raid boss, so here goes.

Suicune is weak against electric and grass type attacks.

If you're basically lacking just about everything, you still have jolteon. Give it Thunder Shock / Thunderbolt or Discharge, and you're ready to go. The main weakness with jolteon is that it's a squishy.


However, you really want an exeggutor. There's a lot of targets in the gyms that hate grass attacks anyway, and a Bullet Seed / Solar Beam exeggutor should be part of your offensive lineup.

Now there's a catch with exeggutor when it comes to taking down suicune. Your target comes with either Extrasensory or Snarl. The attacks are identical apart from typing. Psychic and dark. Snarl will inflict twice the damage that Extrasensory does due to that difference in typing.


Since we in Europe got to see raikou last there's a perfectly valid reason to build a zapdos. Charge Beam / Thunderbolt and start spamming super effective charge attacks.


I personally lead into the fights with my trusty victrebeel. Razor Leaf / Leaf Blade is an outright nasty combination for softening suicune up before it starts spamming charge attacks of its own. Now victrebeel isn't anything I suggest you investing your hardwon stardust into. I just happen to have a perfect IV one I maxed out a long time ago.


Suicune's charge attacks are all water, so they're ineffective against grass but deal neautral damage to electric type pokemon. It shows in staying power when you compare your electric type attackers with your grass type ones.


As usual, if you're short of a full team there's always dragonite as a backup. In this fight it comes with the added bonus that water attacks are ineffective against dragon type pokemon.

Gym battles, on temporality

In an old post I wrote about gym types. While everything about the old combat system is obsolete, the typing of gyms still holds true.

With the new gym system temporality becomes a lot more important than before. Basically just about every gym becomes a remote gym during night time to a lesser or greater degree.


Try to get an idea of at which times the gyms you're primarily interested in are trafficed. An easy way to create a presence and collect cheap coins is to tear it down and assign defenders just when the traffic goes down.

You can also increase that temporal envelope by pushing the gym into the high traffic time as long as you have good defenders available. It's likely to cost you a few golden razzberries to do that.


Don't forget that some events can turn a low traffic gym into a high traffic one. This will almost always coincide with an especially juicy boss raid.


While I agree that a low traffic gym can have just about anything assigned to it, the same is most definitely not true for the high traffic ones. At least not if you make even a small attempt at keeping it for some time.

The combination of maxed out blissey, chansey and snorlax in a gym still works as a deterrent. Add maxed out lapras, vaporeon and steelix to the equation and most rival trainers will refuse to solo it.

When you start berry feeding a high quality gym even pairs or small groups of rival trainers will simply give up the attack. This is especially true when the clock's ticking down to when a legendary boss spawns, after which the gym is raid locked for an hour.

Event finishing, get ready for the daily grind

So, in a couple of hours the equinox event will be history. Now comes the daily grind.

Especially in Europe we're most definitely talking the daily grind since the new doggie is a joke.

So, if we have a look at it from an eurocentric point of view. There's a bloody awful dog for your daily free pass. You're quite honestly better off with a tier four boss raid as soon as you've collected a passable suicune.

It's time to pour out all that stardust you collected unless you've already done so. For those who didn't, well save 205K dust for mewtwo. It'll be released sooner or later, and you're going to max at least one out.

Until then? Pump up another tyranitar unless you already have an ample supply of them. In the longer run the same goes for rhydon in preparation for raikou come November.

Did you get enough chansey and or snorlax to pump up another defender or two? You know my stance on this. Max out your defenders. If nothing else you get extra hit points on them.

A last note. 100 dust per mon caught was perfectly servicable before the event. It's slower, but you probably built most of your mons the hard way. It's not going to change.

Happy grinding.

Equinox event, how to finish

A little more than halfway into the event it's time to give at least a fleeting thought to how to finish it in the best way.

I'm primarily thinking about planning your eggs to be hatched.

If you're running with every egg in an incubator you can disregard this post. It's aimed at trainers who walk with two or three super incubators active at a time.

Basically there are two goals. Maximize stardust or maximize hatching benefits.


If you want to squeeze out as much stardust as possible then only slot in ten kilometre eggs into super incubators the last two days you plan to be active. Wait with the five kilometre ones until you run out of the ten ones. Only use the infinite incubator for two kilometre eggs.

After the event you'll just walk through the stash of two kilometre eggs to see if you got lucky with the content inside. It's quick and you'll be back to normal playing pretty fast.


If you're in it for the hatching then the opposite pretty much holds true. You want to stock up on ten kilometre eggs and rotate through the two kilometre ones as fast as possible during the last active day of playing. Rotating through the two kilometre ones gives you more shots at the event specific hatches.

The added bonus is that you can hatch a sweet batch of ten kilometre eggs after the event at your leisure.

Equinox event, what to do with exess lure modules

Normally I don't use graphics in this blog, but there are things that just can't be explained with words.

Pokemon Go up

And we're live again.

Pokemon Go down

You've probably read it by now, but anyway.

Pokemon Go is down hard.

Event, on eggs

I've found a pretty sweet compromise between shelling out huge loads of cash and starving for hatching eggs.

The 2km eggs go into the infinity incubator. Everything else is slotted into a 'blue' incubator.


Sure, the day I end up with nine 2km eggs I'll probably reevaluate my position on this. Still, up to now it's been working as a stardust machine.


Since Nintic chose to flood us with 10km eggs the incubators are superb tools for amassing stardust. The main problem is a huge surplus of lures unless you're force feeding them into a route for amassing stardust on the go.

Event, some extras

So, I verified a small but nice addition to the event rewards. You get double stardust from feeding berries as well.

For the first hour there was the usual Niantic error as usual. In this case it turned out you didn't actually get double stardust but an extra 100 dust instead, so I ended up with 400 dust for caching an evolved version of a pokemon. After one hour that bug was fixed.


And... there are package deals this event as well. Let's have a lok at them.

Special box

• 480 coins
• 3 super incubators
• 5 lure modules

Great box

• 980 coins
• 5 super incubators
• 4 lucky eggs
• 10 lure modules

Ultra box

• 1480 coins
• 8 super incubators
• 8 lucky eggs
• 15 lure modules

If you, like me, aren't interested in lucky eggs, then the special box it is. Basically it offers three superior incubators for a 30 coins premium price, and then you get five lure modules for rounding off a day hatching eggs.

It's a perfectly decent deal.

Both the great and ultra boxes pretty much require that you're interested in getting a bunch of lucky eggs. If not then they're awful deals. For that reason we need to look at them from a lucky egg point of view.

For 980 coins you get 250 coins worth of lucky eggs. Are the remaining 730 coins well spent? Five super incubators for 750 coins is probably the best way to look at the remaining coins. Arguably a super incubator is worth more than 150 coins, but just to make the comparison easier.

That leaves you with 10 lure modules. If you're interested in those the great box is a great deal. If not, well...

Lastly the ultra box sets you back 1480 coins. There's 500 coins worth of lucky eggs but let's call it 480 in order to round the remaining coins off to 1000. The eight super incubators could be said to be worth 1200 coins, so you're already ahead here.

If you're interested in lure modules then the ultra box is a killer deal since not only do you save 200 coins for lucky eggs and super incubators alone, but you get a whopping 15 lure modules thrown in for good measure.

In fact...

Let's assume you're discarding all eight lucky eggs immediately upon delivery. That makes them worth zero coins.

Eight super incubators are still worth 1200 coins.

Fifteen lure modules are worth in the order of 1300 coins.

So, if you planned to shop an eight pack lure modules before the event, then the ultra box is still a perfectly valid deal even if you're trashing the lucky eggs.

Upcoming event, preparation

The ten day long event will go live in nite or ten hours from now.

So, how to cram out the most of it for the least effort?


There's no avoiding catching lots and lots of pokemon. It's after all a stardust event. This makes it appealing to stay put at a lure cluster, but that would be pretty suboptimal.

Since the current legendary doggie has pretty much overstayed its welcome in each region let's tone down the boss raiding for a bit. We want incubators for those coins instead.


At the start of the event shop two, or preferably three, incubators. Then get rid of all five kilometre eggs, and ten kilometres if you have them. You want to keep the non two kilometre eggs rotated as quickly as possible.

The infinite incubator should be perfectly fine for handling the special two kilometre ones. Five or more of those hatched per day should be easy to do, or say fifty for the duration of the event. That way you're pretty much bound to get something nice.


Cleaning out every other egg gains you an average of 2000 stardust per five kilometres walked per egg incubated. It's nothing to scoff at.


Unless you're already doing a lot of gym battles you should at least use friendly gyms as trash cans for the excess berries you're bound to amass while walking and catching.

Personally I'll kick down an extra gym or two. It's simply too boring just grinding stardust, and it's a more fun way to get rid of the potions and revives I'll collect while hatching eggs.

In short:

• Stock up on a few incubators
• Get rid of five and ten kilometre eggs
• Hatch 2 kilometre eggs in the infinite incubator
• Keep moving and don't get stuck by lure clusters

Event, Equinox

From September 22 to October 2 there's a new event.

• Double stardust from catches
• Double stardust from hatching eggs
• Triple XP from catching a new pokemon (so not really for high level players)
• 2 km eggs may hatch pokemon normally asociated with 10 km eggs. Chansey, mareep and larvitar are specifically mentioned. Observe that the eggs have to be collected during the event.
• Event specific boxes in the shop
• New incubators that cuts walking distance by a third

EX raid testing, Sweden

Seems field testing has gone live in Sweden as well.

That most likely means it's gone live elsewhere in Europe as well.

This is unconfirmed as of yet.

Gym battles, network error

My sample size isn't all that great, but with the latest client network error is merely bloody awful but not a total blocker when you're trying to attack a gym where you have previously boss raided the same day or late the previous day.

For some reason leaving after every battle slightly mitigates the problem. It's not a guaranteed work around, but at least my personal experience is that it enables you to run every third battle or so without an error.

While I wouldn't continue through a gym with six full defenders, using this trick is worth it if the gym is almost down from the beginning.


The problem with contamination still persists though. By contamination I'm referring to how one trainer who runs into the network error will spread that error to other trainers currently fighting the same defender even if they haven't boss raided that gym at all.


A final fix for this problem seems to be something we'll have to wait for some time.

Gym battles, tactical reminder

An extremely short post today.


When tearing down a gym with fewer than six defenders inside, remember to shave the gym. take out the first defender before you start working on the rest.

Well, unless you want to have the gym refilled with extra defenders while you're working on it.

Articuno, suicune, side by side

This post will mostly be for completion.

The mystic legendaries can't really be compared to each other. In difference from moltres/entei and zapdos/raikou articuno and suicune fill different niches.

Articuno:

• Base stamina 180
• Base attack 192
• Base defence 249
• Type flying/ice
• Best attacks Frost Breath / Blizzard or Ice Beam

Suicune:

• Base Stamina 200
• Base attack 180
• Base defence 235
• Type water
• Best attacks Extra Sensory or Snarl / Hydro Pump

Let's start with suicune. It's a dex-filler. As in a patently worthless pokemon for anything but dex-completion. If you want a water type attacker even the tank vaporeon comes with better punch and bulk than suicune.

Not even a 100 IV Suicune should be worth the stardust invested for powering it up. Collect it and forget it.

Articuno isn't a totally pointless pokemon though. While Jynx packs a distinctly better punch it's definitely a glass cannon.

Articuno does the same job as cloyster but comes with a much better bulk. While you're not supposed to tank your way through the defenders, at least surviving the encounter comes in handy.

What articuno does best, however, is to free up eventual lapras you're currently using as special case attackers. Should dragonite enter the scene as a raid boss a pumped up articuno will come in handy as well.

Taking Blizzard or Ice Beam is a matter of playing style. If you're going kamikaze then pick Ice Beam to avoid ending combat with more than 50 energy. Dodging players might prefer Blizzard.

Zapdos, raikou, side by side

In preparation for when the electric dog hits Europe I'll set the two electric type legendaries against each other.

Zapdos:

• Base stamina 180
• Base attack 253
• Base defence 188
• Type electric / flying
• Best attacks Charge Beam / Thunderbolt

Raikou:

• Base stamina 180
• Base attack 241
• Base defence 210
• Type electric
• Best attacks Thunder Shock / Wild Charge

Both pokemon share the same stamina with raikou coming out ahead in terms of defence.

The flying typing for zapdos makes it a little iffy for attacking into lapras since ice attacks are supereffective against flying.

Since the two pokemon don't share the best move sets it's not a given that the 12 extra base attack will settle which one is the best attacker even in terms of raw dps.

Zapdos comes with Charge Beam as a primary attack. It pretty much shares the attributes of Bullet Seed for exeggutor, with Charge Beam being slightly better at pumping up energy for the charge attacks. As a primary attack Charge Beam is pretty lackluster, and it's basically only there to prepare the charge attack.

Raikou has access to Thunder Shock and Volt Switch as primary attacks. While Volt Switch comes with a slighty better DPS, Thunder Shock ramps up energy at a distinctly better pace. It's also much easier to dodge incoming attacks if you use Thunder Shock.

Thunder Shock and Charge Beam ramps up energy at a basically identical rate, and since Thunder Shock comes with a higher DPS than Charge Beam it's likely that Raikou will deal more damage than Zapdos with the primary attacks despite a lower base attack stat.

Zapdos has the two bar Thunderbolt as its best charge attack. It's an 80 power move with a 2.5 second cast time. While using Zap Cannon should yield a higher dps for a long fight, zapdos' stamina simply won't sustain any long fights. You're likely to end combat with a lot of unused energy.

Raikou has the two bar Wild Charge as its best charge attack. It's a 90 power move with a 2.6 second cast time.

As far as charge moves go Wild Charge deals 10% higher dps compared to Thunderbolt given the same attack stat. Zapdos 12 higher base attack stat only gives a 5% advantage, so raikou should come out ahead again.

With better bulk, no type disadvantages against likely targets and a slightly higher dps, raikou is the better attacker of the two electric type legendaries.

Apart from some fights against gyarados, and not even all of those fights, raikou is the best electric type pokemon for attacks in the game. Jolteon will be better against some gyardos, but overall picking raikou as your goto electric type attacker is a no-brainer.

Entei is not the best fire type attacker

Really!

I'm seing ludicruous arguments why entei is the best fire type pokemon.

Now let's get this straight. Stop tanking your opponents. Moltres does more damage, end of story.


So, but flying takes supereffective damage from more sources than a fire type only pokemon?

Eh, ok, let's have a look.

Flying is weak against ice. We'll have a look at that later.

Flying is also weak against electric and rock type attacks. OK, electric and rock type attacks? In what alternative universe did you plan to attack into electric and rock type pokemon with a fire type attacker in the first place?


Remains ice. Or let's be real, remains lapras.


Lapras has a fifty percent chance to lead into the fight with a water based primary attack. Lapras has a thirty three percent chance to slam you with Hydro Pump as a charge attack.

My first pick is not, repeat not, a fire based attacker with that high a risk of receiving water type attacks against me.


And there was this thing with ice. Who in their right mind would pick Fire Spin / Overheat over Counter / Dynamic Punch when it comes to dealing supereffective damage with STAB bonus against a target with a zero percent chance to deal super effective damage against a fighting type pokemon?

Moltres, entei, side by side

I've written that you should stick to moltres, but I haven't said why.

This is why.

Moltres:

• Base stamina 180
• Base attack 251
• Base defence 184
• Type fire / flying
• Best attacks Fire Spin / Overheat

Entei:

• Base stamina 230
• Base attack 235
• Base defence 176
• Type fire
• Best attacks Fire Spin / Overheat

Entei is a hard hitting tank, but a tank nonetheless. It's attack stat is about the same as exeggutor, but it's still lower than flareon, which is the base line for fire attackers.

Unless your primary goal is to survive as an attacker you should go for the highest attack stat possible. Glass cannons might be the exception, but with hit points like an exeggutor moltres is most definitely not a glass cannon. With both higher attack and better survivability than flareon moltres is your goto choise for a fire attacker. Especially since you're likely to have an old flareon since days gone by.

Since moltres and entei share the best attack moves the extra 16 attack stat comes in handy. It's a stiff five percent extra damage done by charge moves, and eventual break points for the primary attack kicks in at earlier levels. Especially since Fire Spin runs at 14 power those break points come at closer intervals compared to a primary attack with 5 or 6 power.

Boss raids, raid eggs are back

Since this morning the one hour heads up raid eggs are back. Raids have been shortened to one hour as well.

With this reversal come a number of changes:

• Tiers one through four have a one hour speculation window
• It'll be harder to get people together for the unsoloable boss raids
• The time during which gyms are raid locked is cut in half
• It's possible to flip a gym and defend it in order to get the gym control bonus

Since entei is the only legendary raid boss available in Europe (and obviously other doggies elsewhere) the tier five gyms have no window of speculation at all. You know your local dog will pop into place.

In cities with a huge amount of gyms the speculation window part matters less. However, cutting the raid lock time in half does matter. It means it's a lot easier to take over gyms during day time compared to the last month or so. We should expect a greater gym turnover from now on.

In areas with fewer gyms it's worth taking over a gym with a legendary raid egg to ensure you get the gym control bous. It's after all a full item pack extra. Two extra balls doesn't hurt, but by now players have probably collected the dogs.

In regions where raikou spawns those extra balls might be more interesting, but entei and suicune are inferior to other options when attacking into gyms, and thus the need to actually catch the raid boss is lessened.

Boss raids, mewtwo confirmed

So the exclusve raids are confirmed to be mewtwo.

Boss raids, exclusive raids and mewtwo

Seems that things are moving forward on the exclusive raids front.

The first passes hae been distributed for a few gyms in what's obviously a beta testing period.

Also mewtwo have received updated information, more specifically a six percent base capture rate.

All in all this hints that mewtwo will be the first raid boss for exclusive raids. Within a few days we'll know for certain.

Boss raids, entei, impressions

In Europe we've been saddled with entei as the new legendary raid boss. It's basically a tankier version of flareon, even though flareon deals slightly more damage.

Entei is in almost all aspects inferior to moltres which makes it pretty much a pokedex filler. If, in some kind of future, we're allowed to assign legendaries as gym defenders this won't stay true as entei comes with a hefty amount of hit points.

As a raid boss entei is, quite frankly, a joke. In the role a a raid boss entei can't capitalise on its stamina since all raid bosses in a given tier share the same amount of hit points, and with a very poor defence stat entei is severely hurt by this.

Five level 38 or higher players will run right through entei as a raid boss, and any constellation of seven high level Pokemon Go players will burn it down with a good safety margin.

Entei shares the same problem, of if you prefer, player benefit, as any other fire based defender -- a good vaporeon is simply too easy to get. To add insult to injury moltres and zapdos had trainers give golem a good look, so by now players have a very good line-up against fire pokemon. Add rhydon for players who invested in one since earlier, and entei is in for a really bad abuse.


What happnes now is that we're looking at a month with a decent inflow of rare candy with no new target to assign it to. Since zapdos had trainers scramble to set up a decent line-up against electric type pokemon, and zapdos in itself is the best electric type pokemon until raikou arrives on the scene, this spells disaster for both raikou and suicune when they're here as raid bosses.

One month is plenty of time to boost one zapdos and yet another golem for those so inclined. The first will go berserk on the water type suicune, and players are likely to be surprised when the eletrci type raikou puts up less resistance than epected.


The only thing that can change this is a really juicy reward from the upcoming invitational raids.

Boss raids, new legendaries

August 31 or September 1, depending on where you live one out of three legendaries will be released.

This according to an official Niantic message.

Entei, Raikou and Suicune will be released one at at time for a month each. Note, however, that all three will be out from September, but depending on where you live you'll only have access to one of them at a time.

For trainers in Europe we'll see Entei first, so keep your golems and vaporeon in good shape. Omastar and Rhydon also work perfectly well.

Gym raiding, what use could a casual possibly be

So, you're playing the end game, and you're tearing down gyms. Now, if a player doing the middle game, ie levels 20 to 32, offers to help, is it even worth it?

The answer is yes. Most definitely yes.

I'm being helped by my wife, and she started playing in May. She's started helping out since she reached level 25, at which time I was closing in on 40.

Her contribution when clearing out gyms cuts time by 30 percent, and since we're burning down seven gyms late each evening that's a huge help.


Tactics

I burn down the first defender and after that she joins the battle. Since my line-up plays in a totally different league compared to hers she'll never catch up. However, I usually don't catch up to her until she's burning down the last defender.

By that time five defenders have been cleared out of the gym, and I never need to bother with the second round out of the three needed to wipe out a gym.

The thing here is to have the lower level player wait for the first defender to go down before entering combat. It saves the high level player time while at the same time conserving revives and potions for the lower level one.

As an added bonus you get a player well versed in gym raiding by the time that player leaves the middle game and starts playing high level Pokemon Go.

The downside is the insertion of questionable defensive material into the gym, but let's stay honest here. If you were alone the gym would get one defender assigned. A second defender in the 1500 to 2500 CP range still adds to the defence. Especially if it's a selected defender.

A last advice. Don't push it too far. A middle game player has access to maybe four potentially top class defenders which have been powered up as far as that player is able to. Going above ten gyms will totally deplete that players caapcity.