In Pokemon Go, when you defeat enough Team Go Rocket grunts — the minions of Team Go Rocket, your adversaries in Pokemon Go — their leaders appear. Cliff, Arlo and Sienna. I hope I’m remembering their names correctly. Beat them down enough, and you’ll be able to track down and take on their leader, Giovanni, the worst of the worst.
When I first came back to the game, the leaders were typically too tough for me, but once I started raiding, I got some friends who were able to finally take them down. When I got the quest to take down Giovanni, I first had to hunt down the three leaders and take them down once more. Arlo and Sienna were easy to find, but it took assembling a Team Rocket Radar and prowling the streets of Manchester… at night… in the cold and wind… to find his lair and take him down.
Giovanni immediately attacked — and I just as immediately lost.
Team Go Rocket battles are like any trainer battle in the game. You pick three Pokemon, they pick three, and the one who ends the fight with any Pokemon, wins. They always battle with the shadow forms of the critters; corrupted, stronger forms. At the end, they will let you capture one of the three that you fought, and you have the option of leaving them in their corrupted forms, or purifying them, which weakens their attack, but makes them easier to level up. It’s a balance. Typically, if you have a strong shadow Pokemon, you often want to leave it that way.
Giovanni sent out Shadowed Persian, and that cat was tough. I couldn’t find a counter to it that would let the first Pokemon I sent out survive Persian, while also sending out two charged attacks to bait Giovanni into using up his two blockers. I was raiding last night with my Gyrados — and there’s a story around her — and noticed how quickly she was charging up those ultimate moves, and thought she might be just the thing for Persian.
He’s been pursuing me in a hot air balloon for days, so he was easy to find. Gyrados easily dealt with Persian and baited out the two shields, all according to plan. The first time I fought Giovanni, he sent out Nidoking as his next Pokemon, and I had Mega Gardevoir to counter him. This time, though, he sent out Shelldir, I think? Cloyster? Not what I expected. But Gyrados got out a (not very effective) charged attack before she died, and Mega Gardevoir did the rest, surviving well into Giovanni’s final critter, Registeel.
I’d had Flareon waiting for this. Giovanni always opens with Persian, and always ends with the same Pokemon for the month, so I knew I’d be facing Registeel. Flareon tore right through it, and I finally won.
Rayquaza and Latias
Rayquaza, a flying dragon Pokemon, isn’t a hard raid, but I had to fight it three times before I could catch it. I even had my son try catching it on my phone the second time around, but he didn’t do any better than I did. My problem is that sometimes Pokemon I want to capture are too far away, and I just can’t hit the right spot with a Pokeball. But with patience and some luck, I got it.
The app I use for raiding, Poke Genie, refused to even let me queue up for a 5-7 person Latias raid at my level and with my weak Pokemon. The queue for the 8 or more trainer raid was 8,192, a number that is easy for a programmer to remember. It took hours to work through the queue. There were thirteen trainers in the raid, and we took her down quickly. I was lucky enough to catch her on my second throw, and then I saw something that made my blood run cold.
She was the first mega pokemon I’d seen that took 300 mega energy instead of just 200 to awaken her mega form. You get 200 of the mega energy for defeating a mega raid, which is usually enough to do the trick. For Latias, and presumably for her brother Latios, I’m going to need to defeat her twice. Well, maybe I’ll get her shiny the second time. The shiny is an automatic catch.
Primal Rumblings
All of this is a prelude to Primal Rumblings, which starts tomorrow, I think. Primal Kyogre and Groudon will appear. The prelude quests have us trying to catch the Hoenn starters and all of their evolutions. There are raids for the first two evolutions of all three, and all are soloable by me — I took down the three star Marshstomp raid myself this morning, easy 5000 xp. I need a hundred of each of their candies to get their final forms. I have been catching their lesser forms yesterday and today, but I still am nowhere near having enough candies to get any of their final evolutions. There’s a good chance that I can find them in the wild, but I do have to work and stuff.
Hoping to remember to be in place for the five minute special event at noon to 12:05 PM.
So much to do.
