Lugia makes a return

So we're getting the defender bird back again. I won't go into if lugia is anything to have or not, but it's the legenadry we'll be stuck with for a couple of weeks.

There are some camel dung -worthy recommendations out there, so I'll run through a shortlist of pokemon to have in a line-up. OK, the content in the linked to article wasn't all bad, but a far cry from good enough.

The extremely short version:

• If it's good enough to bring to a mewtwo raid it's good enough against lugia

That said we have quite a few more options.

Raikou, zapdos and jolteon bring an electric punch which you're not interested in for a mewtwo raid.

Of these raikou is the best pick if you have one. Stick to Thunder Shock / Wild Charge. There was a mild aroma of burning camel dung coming from the article. 

You're working with Wild Charge, which is a two bar attack, so there is absolutely no reason to walz around with a 2.3 second lockdown Volt Switch as a charge attack for an extremely minor increase in primary attack dps at a double cost -- decreased energy gain and stripping yourself from even a theoretical chance of dodging an incoming attack.

Zapdos and jolteon are secondary and tertiary picks.

Tyranitar is the second most attractive attacker after raikou. I personally prefer Crunch over Stone Edge for this fight since Bite quite frankly sucks at building energy and I stand a huge risk of going down with an 80 point energy bar. Still, in theory Stone Edge will do more damage during an infinitely long fight.

As usual start with a glass cannon. A gengar or alakazam configured for mewtwo raids is your best pick. Jynx works as well.

Disregarding the allure of camel dung you're going with Psycho Cut as a primary move both for alakazam and mewtwo. A slow, energyinefficient and not very effective primary attack is a bloody awful recommendation, so steer clear of Confusion. Shadow Ball, however, remains the correct pick.

Don't forget the rocky balls. Golem remains a good attacker if you get party cloudy weather, and so does omastar if you're lucky enough to have one with the rock type legacy primary move.

Kyogre, rayquaza and dragonite are all viable picks if you lack the really good attackers.

While Blizzard is a better pick than Hydro Pump for kyogre I'm not entirely convinced you can count on firing one off before your kyogre takes a dive. Waterfall is awful when it comes to building energy. In other words, it might not be worth it spending your CTM that way since any kyogre you're planning to bring into the fight probably comes with Hydro Pump.

If you're less than eight people I recommend you to check the individual capacity of the present players. Lugia remains a beast to take down. Think kyogre with extra bulk.

Changing meta game due to raid boss

With the switch from kyogre to rayquaza as the legendary raid boss a change in the meta game is both clearly visible as well as rather obvious.

I'm talking the gym raiding part of the game rather than the boss raiding one.

Since kyogre made short work of your lineup the problem with a general lack of potions and revives got further aggravated. Unless the lobby got filled you were likely to leave the boss raid with less material for gym raiding than what you had when you arrived.

Rayquaza is a push over and on average you should end up with a surplus of hyper potions and revives.

Indirectly this means you'll have more material with which to start hulking into gyms, which translates into a devaluation of the golden razz berries for gym defence.


In short:

Two weeks ago berry feeding gyms meant running the attacker dry on potions and revives.

Now stubbornly hacking into gyms, especially if you're two or three attackers, means depleting the defender's berry storage.


The change is brutally clear when opposing teams meat before a boss raid, two attacking into the gym and one defending it. The number of casual attackers is visibly increased since they have the potions and revives to afford joining into the fray. This in turn accelerates berry depletion since the defenders go down that much faster.

In the end it means it's harder to defend other gyms since you're running even lower on golden razz berries.

The finer points of kamikaze

There honestly isn't much in the way of different tactics after you've picked your attacker and are on your way into the fight.

Basically we have dodge everything, dodge charge attacks and kamikaze.

One would think that a player who picks a kamikaze approach is left without anything resembling options after the fight has started. However, in reality things aren't that easy.


We need to understand the game mechanics here. Quite often I've see the term cool down being used for the pokemon charge attacks. That term is, as far as most old school gamers go, incorrectly used.

Coold down is the time from some defined starting point (for example the time since your last spell took effect) until the same ability can be attempted again.

In Pokemon Go only defending pokemon in gyms have a cool down. I've read numbers varying from 1.2 up to 1.6 seconds. The exact number isn't important for this article, but let's assume the number is 1.5 seconds. That means that after your attacker has taken damage it takes 1.5 seconds before the defending pokemon is allowed to start attempting the next attack.


So, cool down was the incorrect term. What is the correct one then?


Cast time. Cast time in general means the time from when an ability is attempted until it has taken effect.

In Pokemon Go this is the time it takes from when you (succesfully) tap the screen until the attack goes off. During this time your attacking pokemon is locked in place and can't do anything, like dodge for example.


This is where the finer points of kamikaze come in.

Let's have a look at machamp, or the attacks Counter and Dynamic Punch to be more exact. Counter comes with a 0.9 second cast time, and Dynamic Punch takes 2.7 seconds to take effect.

Now let's have a look at blissey, or its best charge attack specifically. Dazzling Gleam comes with a 3.5 second cast time.

This means that unless your energy bar is at fifty points it's impossible to fire off a Counter and a Dynamic Punch during the time it takes the defender to cast Dazzling Gleam.


Effectively this means that when your health is low enough for the announced Dazzling Gleam to send your attacker unconcious you should almost never attempt to start attacking with Dynamic Punch when you notice an incoming Dazzling Gleam. You'll be spending a small or large fraction of 2.7 seconds doing zero damage before going down. Better keep tapping away those 0.9 second Counters unstead.


I won't even try to argue why firing off that 3.9 second Outrage with your attacking dragonite is an excersise in futility against just about any existing charge attack in the game hellbent on knocking your nite out.

Kyogre raid boss

Seems there are still some questions about how to handle it.

Basically, if it has Blizzard as a charge move you might want to rethink your lineup.


Raikou is always good, so if you have a good one put it to use.


Jolteon, victrebeel and sceptile are good as a first attacker no matter the moveset of Kyogre.



Non-blizzard:

• Zapdos
• Exeggutor
• Venusaur

Blizzard (if you care about incoming damage):

• Groudon with Solar Beam
• Kyogre with Thunder
• Ho-Oh with Solar Beam

Personally I run with the same lineup no matter what. Jolteon first, then Victrebeel and after that Zapdos and Exeggutor. The cost in potions and revives is massive against Blizzard, so you might not want to do this. My reason is that I prioritise damage done over damage taken, and hence the preferred Blizzard-alternatives are a no-go as far as I'm concerned.

Harder than beating the boss is catching it. Switch AR on and off and it'll reset in the centre for an easier throw.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Mewtwo, why you shouldn't smoke camel dung when giving advice

I've been reading the same advice from two sources concerning mewtwo as a raid boss.

The main culprits are:

• Gamepress
• Rankedboost

In all likelyhood the idiocy has spread from there as well.

Moronic counters

Rankedboost is the worst by a very wide margin, so to make things abundantly clear -- stay the hell away from murcrow, butterfree and ledian when building your lineup against mewtwo.

Let's go through the basics of how dealing damage works in Pokemon Go. This is an extremely simplified version, and for that reason includes some rounding errors, but it covers the basics.

I'm disregarding:

• the rounding off mechanism which guarantees any attack to deal at least 1 point of damage. It's very important for primary attacks but less so for charge attacks.
• the level difference multiplier (level of attacking versus defending pokemon, not level of player)

Assume your attack move does 100 damage against a neutral target:

• STAB multiplies that damage by 1.2
• Being super effective multiplies that damage by 1.4
• Being double super effective multiplies that damage by 2 (1.4 squared)
• Being not very effective multiplies that damage by 0.7
• Being doubly not very effective multiplies that damage by 0.5 (0.7 squared)
• That damage is multiplied by attackers attack stat and then divided by the defenders defence stat

Did you get the last part? Attack divided by defence is a multiplier.

The attack stat is a pokemons base attack stat plus 0 - 15, ie the IV attack value of the pokemon. The same goes for defence.

In the case of mewtwo defence is around 200, but for picking an attacker this isn't all that important. Let's say (most likely incorrectly) that the raid boss version of mewtwo has exactly 200 defence.

Base attack stats for suggested crap:

• Murcrow -- 85
• Butterfree -- 45
• Ledian -- 35

Base attack stats for pokemon which are not very effective against mewtwo (given psychic and fighting attacks):

• Exeggutor -- 233
• Alakazam -- 271
• Machamp -- 234

So, since mewtwo is a psychic type pokemon we're comparing murcrow's supereffective attacks with machamp's not very effective attacks. To give murcrow an even greater advantage we're setting it's attack IV to 15 and machamp to 0.

• Murcrow 100 attack and machamp 234 attack.
• Murcrow 1.4 multiplier and machamp 0.7 multiplier

Machamp still does more damage by a more than 15% margin given similar attacks despite being at a 100% disadvantage due to combat move typing. Incidentally machamp's best attacks are better than murcrow's.

We won't even look at the atrocities that are butterfree and ledian.

Moronic moves suggestions

Once again Rankedboost has access to the largest stash of camel dung. They explicitly advice you to go with Stone Edge as the charge move for tyranitar.

Gamepress merely incorrectly states that there's no big difference between Crunch and Stone Edge since Bite is the only attack that counts anyway. So in fact they just lit up the dung at a distance from which they couldn't get a really bad trip.

Let's go through the attacks.

Stone Edge:

• 100 power
• Requires 100 energy
• 2.3 seconds cast time
• Deals neutral damage against mewtwo (multiplier 1.0)

Crunch:

• 70 power
• Requires 33 energy
• 3.2 seconds cast time
• Deals super effective damage against mewtwo (multiplier 1.4)

Bite:

• 6 power
• Adds 4 energy
• 0.5 seconds cast time
• Deals super effective damage against mewtwo (multiplier 1.4)

So 25 Bite attacks builds 100 energy. Now you build energy by taking damage as well, but we're just comparing Crunch and Stone Edge here.

50 Bite attacks would allow you to fire off Stone Edge twice.

According to a Reddit thread each Bite attack will inflict 7 damage against mewtwo given a decent enough tyranitar. This implies that 6 (power) time 1.4 (super effective) times attack divided by defence is 7 after all the rounding off to get an integer as the damage value.

Creating the most beneficial scenario for Stone Edge yields the data below:

Crunch will deal 75 damage given a decent tyranitar.

So, 70 (Crunch power) times 1.4 times X is close to 75. This yields an X value of close to 0.8.

Applying that 0.8 against Stone Edge we see how the 100 power would result in it dealing 80 damage.

Now let's count that damage for Stone Edge:

• 50 Bite does 350 damage
• 2 Stone Edge does 160 damage
• The time required is 25 plus 4.6 seconds, so around 30 seconds in total.
• 510 damage dealt in total

How much damage can we deal with Crunch in 30 seconds?

25 Bite will yield the energy to fire off 3 Crunch. That takes 12.5 plus 9.6 seconds.

Can we squeeze in a fourth Crunch before we've reached 30 seconds?

9 Bite gives 36 energy. That takes 4.5 plus 3.2 seconds, so in total 7.7 seconds.

In total 29.8 seconds, which we round off to 30.

Damage done with Crunch:

• 34 Bite does 238 damage
• 4 Crunch does 300 damage
• 538 damage in total

A solid 5% extra damage with Crunch and you never risk fainting with more than 33 energy. This is an extremely important difference since Bite is a bloody awful primary attack when it comes to building energy. Statistically a Stone Edge tyranitar is likely to go down with enough energy built up to fire off an extra Crunch.

It's possible to squeeze out more damage by having a better tyranitar, but that merely increases Stone Edge damage from 80 to 81 and Crunch from 75 to 80, which widens the gap to 512 versus 558.

Suddenly we have a 46 damage difference, which is closer to 10%, and the benefits from pushing that button every 33 energy still remains.

Notably I haven't taken into account that you'll never, ever produce useless energy with Crunch, which automatically happens if you fail to fire off an 100 energy charge attack before you would receive any more energy. This further increases the gap between Crunch and Stone Edge.

For a gamer a 10% performance boost is just huge at the end game level. Even 5% extra is an important increase.

Closing Words

To further clarify why poor advice is poor. The difference between a Crunch tyranitar and a Stone Edge tyranitar in this fight is larger than the difference between a Stone Edge tyranitar and a DT/Outrage dragonite versus the mewtwo raid boss.

I haven't read aywhere that it doesn't matter if you pick a tyranitar or a dragonite for mewtwo as a raid boss.

Boss raiding, how rewards are distributed

The people at Siplh Road has run some statistics on boss raid rewards, and they did come to some faily interesting conclusions.


Basically you get more items for getting more premium balls. So stick to gyms your own colour, group up with trainers your own colour and don't cheat on your line-up.

We're talking a range from 4 to 8 item sets, which means you can double your gains by going from six to thirteen premium balls.