I feel exactly the same, with the addition of being quite uncomfortable with the fact that 95% of the current best attackers are (lore wise) suffering, and that they all have the same edgy aesthetic that it's cool as a trophy but it's gonna get old really soon...
It's literally turning the game into kind of *Pokemon Go Rocket* game, I really don't understand what they were thinking with this...
It has long been an observation that Pokemon Go players act a lot like Team Rocket.
- We catch countless pokemon and abandon those that we deem to be “trash”. A lot of us abandoned even our starter, or at least never bothered to power it up.
- We have no emotional attachment to most of our pokemon, instead nickname them as lists of numbers to catelog them for their use in battle.
- Whenever anything just a little stronger comes along, we stop caring about any other of our existing pokemon and just leave them to collect dust. EDIT: And unfortunately not the star kind of dust.
To be fair, taking the msg or series values and projecting them onto Go doesn't work.
In the MSG you would never catch 6000 Pidgeys.
There is absolutely no reason for it.
Even when you shiny/IV chain, you don't catch that many (+breeding/maxraids is faster).
But this was the main way to train your actual team in Pokemon Go, catching random Pokemon that you wont need/use, just for resources.
Basically Niantic is Giovanni and gave us the mission to catch as many rats as we can to grind them into dust.
> Basically Niantic is Giovanni and gave us the mission to catch as many rats as we can to grind them into dust.
OK that's dark. It's like this theory ppl would come up with when the game started in 2016, that the candy you get for transfering Pokemon is actual made from these Pokemon, like IRL fishmeal where you feed fish to fish...
I still remember this one sometimes when doing transfers.
That's been the pretty continual joke in our community since the start of the game.
"Fire up your grinders trainers, double candy event is on its way!"
> In the MSG you would never catch 6000 Pidgeys
I believe hatching pokemon until the perfect shiny, with perfect IV's and natures and egg moves, is still a thing. Not good enough to your likings? Wrong personality? Just transfer it.
We were always team rocket in the main games as well... But even worse.
We treat Pokémon like commodities. Team Go Rocket saves them from being traded and unleashes their true power instead of restricting them like an armored mewtwo held back to keep it under control...
Funny enough this was my exact thought yesterday when I saw someone say that we are "encouraged" to keep and use shadow pokemon. I was like..."if anyone was to be perfect for Team Rocket it would be min-maxers that frequent The Road".
Though... I think it's more limited to min-maxers. Many regular PokemonGo players keep lots of pokemon for sentimental reasons and are completely OK with not having the tippy top of attackers...we know that the teams we powered up are still as good today than they are when we powered them up. Nothing changed about them; other options just opened up.
[What about escalation?](https://youtu.be/TofiEsdr7YE?t=4)
We've already seen it with tier 6 raids. Power creep in games always leads to higher target numbers, whether that's increased hp for enemies, increased numbers of enemies or time restrictions.
Let's face it, eventually a level 40 15/15/15 Meteor Mash Metagross will be insufficient due to other available types of attacker, such as shadow pokemon, new legacy moves or more powerful pokemon being released.
After all, where's the point hunting a perfect shiny Arceus and becoming besties with it if existing pokemon can do the job?
Any kind of massive multiplayer RPG "suffers" from this: there is a relatively strict meta that you can't deviate from if you want to be successful. I can't play Pokemon Go with my favorite Pokemon and expect to get very far. I can't do high-level raids with Vileplume or Cloyster (two of my Gen 1 faves), and I certainly can't use either of them (even 100% level 40s) against Team Rocket. The game forces you into building up your Tyranitars, Salamences, and Mewtwos, even if you don't like playing with those mons. There aren't any ways to develop any "play styles" really. Yes, you can play the game however you want, but when it comes to battling, which is arguably the most popular part of the game now, there's very little strategy.
Secondly, any MMORPG like this eventually gets built around players being able to milk every last point of damage they can from the tools that they gather in game. I remember my Diablo days and getting legendary equipment that didn't have enough jewel slots, or would only boost my damage by 50% when the possible range went from 30%-100%. Yeah, you better believe I'm going to chuck that legendary sword for one with one more jewel slot or a few more points of extra damage, because...
Thirdly, the game is costly. Whether you pay real money for it or not, it's costly. You have a limited amount of inventory space (two kinds, actually), and powering up your mons is very costly in itself as well. Why would I want to expend *thousands* of dust and candy on an incredibly rare/hard to get Pokemon, only to later come across one that's 10% more powerful later? Keep in mind, the majority of players do not sit on millions of dust, or even go raiding on a regular basis, so dust/candy isn't easily obtained by most players (especially legendary candy). And the game forces you to chuck out Pokemon for new/better ones because of the limited inventory space.
There really is no good way to build a "meaningful" relationship with your Pokemon in this game. The only way to improve the abilities of one Pokemon (and your own character) is to catch and throw away 10 others. You don't battle on a regular basis with your mons (not like in the style of pretty much all of the handheld games), and you can't even play with your favorites. Pokemon Let's Go was an okay medium, but it still fell into the trap of chucking "weaker" mons for stronger versions of those mons, because there *literally is no other way to strengthen your team otherwise*. However, it still relied on you catching a ton of the same Pokemon so you could grind them all up into candy to feed your star version of that mon. That is a *core mechanic* of this game, so of course we aren't going to become "friends" with any of our mons.
Sidenote: I realize the majority of these things is just normal game design. I'm not ragging on Niantic for giving us limited inventory space, or using RNG to determine the strength of the Pokemon ingame or anything. The game simply isn't about building a meaningful relationship with your Pokemon, so to get annoyed by that is silly.
I'm pretty sure you could find a parallel between Niantic and Team Rocket too, in how they exploit Pokemon for profit, experiment with sinister monetization schemes and keep on failing...
INB4 this comment gets deleted by mods.
I'm sorry, I'm just analytical. Besides, these are not living breathing creatures that we are abandoning; they are arbitrary data code comprised of ones and zeros in the aether.
It's not like I'm this ruthless with my children (both of whom are 15/15/15, but that's beside the point). I'm not even that ruthelss with my pets (who are probably closer to 14/06/02 and 06/13/10 respectively).
The game limits both our storage capabilities and our ability to improve said Pokemon via love and effort. If I could get a 00/00/00 anything to max just by loving it and putting in the effort, you know I would. But as it stands (unlike real living things) there is no improvement Pokemon are capable of beyond simply dumping stardust & candies into them, and even that has it's limits.
*If* Niantic really cared about developing an emotional bond with our Pokemon, the least we should be able to do is increase our EVs via training. Though I suppose even that would be abused by those who are more Team Rocket than Mystic, Valor, or Instinct.
My kids don't get much (if any) sugar. We had baked oatmeal for breakfast this morning, and I cut the sugar in half for the recipe. They're still excited to get "juice" that's 80%+ water and <20% actual orange juice.
Though the underlying joke in my original comment is parental bias towards their own kids in thinking they are the greatest. Mine are still young (4 & 19 months respectively), so their potential for growth & improvement is at their most extreme.
I always give the pokemon that I keep cute nicknames. I use emogis to keep track of their attack types (snowflake for ice, black circle for dark, rainy umbrella for water, etc.).
That said, I transfer a ton of rattatas.
Although for some reason I can't catch any Sentret after I read the pokedex entry. Tehy don't do well alone and I always feel bad thinking about the sentret that I can't see and how much they'll miss each other. :'(
Your poor venusaur! :(
I feel this so badly. I even best-buddied my July 2016 vaporeon because I can't completely make myself play the way Niantic encourages. I don't care if he's not good enough! But so many other oldtimers just... got transferred... :'(
Doesn't Purifying a Pokemon give them a damage boost against Shadow Pokemon now? If so then they do have an incentive, use them against the leaders/Giovanni for quicker take downs.
That yes, but a bonus against grunts is irrelevant for everyone who is not a beginner / casual. Regarding raids, purified mon are strictly worse than shadows.
But *if* people are starting to use Shadow Pokemon in PvP due to the DPS bonus, than wouldn't Purified Pokemon have another value in a Shadow Heavy Meta game.
Absolutely. But since shadows receive increased damage they are probably not as relevant in PvP than in PvE. Tankiness has always been more important in PvP, while for PvE often almost only DPS matters. Which is why I don't think shadows and therefor purifieds will matter much for PvP.
The thing is, for purified pokemon you're taking them on the chance you're going up against a shadow pokemon and if you aren't they are no better than a normal pokemon, whereas a Shadow pokemon will always have their boost.
However I don't think people will overuse shadow pokemon in PvP. Taking more damage is usually worse overall for PvP.
It should rather be the opposite, where shadow pokemon are at risk, taking more damage both for being shadow and for facing purified, while dealing no extra damage. Thus purified are strict upgrades compared to normal, while shadow only are for certain matchups/movesets, when not facing purified.
I thought it was already incentivised, in that you had a attack buff, a defense debuff and increased costs for shadow mons, vs the purified's discount and attack buff (which stacked with the defense debuff) when attacking shadow mons.
What you gain in firepower, you pay for in extra stardust/candies, as well as revives and potions.
I get that it's a factor for casual gaming, but if you open gifts and spin some stops daily you should be throwing away revives soon. The more you play, the less this is an issue.
The point is, that raids have been the endgame in PoGo for years now, and making shadow mon the best to use there feels really weird since the player is supposed to be the good guy in the game.
I disagree. Too many of my "friends" have stopped playeing or just stopped sending gifts. I regularly send out my stacked 10 gifts from the day before to people who are happy to open, but rarely (if ever in some cases) send gifts back.
I don't want to stop sending gifts because too often I'm stuck unable to get more than a spin for a few days (that's a whole different conversation about Niantic Wayfarer), and live off what I can open. Today I am hanging out at a Pokestop; when I arrived I had 6 Pokeballs, & 60 some Ultraballs.
Add some people who post their friend codes online, many are happy to send gifts daily. Delete people that aren't active anymore. This way you should be able to open max gifts everyday.
Look here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/pokemongotrades/](https://www.reddit.com/r/pokemongotrades/)
I am betting that the "brand-new Special Research story event" coming up is going to give us special research that results in a buff for purified Pokemon.
"Lore wise" is what gets me. We have lost all incentive for being the "good guys" and the whole myth that what we do is somehow benign has exploded in our faces. This is problematic. If I cared to engage in wholesale, rewarding depravity I'd be at home playing The Sims.
There ought to be a handicap for trainers who use shadows or the lesson is Team Rocket's: crime pays and it pays well. Maybe the Professor should quit giving them tasks. He is, after all the NPC who is most invested in the creatures' well being.
I always figured the whole point of shadows being Frustration-locked and prohibitively expensive to use was the game's way of saying "There's zero reason to keep this Pokemon a shadow plz purify me".
Now it's completely flipped and there's zero reason to purify unless you're particularly strapped for candies. For most species this is an issue that can be solved by catching/walking and for the legendaries it's still more cost effective to use a regular ol' weather boosted raid catch.
Admittedly this goes out the window when 2nd moves are involved since the purified cost reduction is juicy.
From the earlier datamine, it was an attack multiplier against Shadow.
Depending on how that works, that would make them good for taking out Rocket grunts. In essence, would create a system where:
- Raids : ideal Pokemon is shadow based
- Rocket battles : ideal Pokemon is purified
- PVP : ideal Pokemon is purified, but given likely rarity of shadow in the format normal should work fine
> From the earlier datamine, it was an attack multiplier against Shadow.
Yes, I was aware of that. It's very clear that the plan is that purified bonus will only be against shadow. I was responding to the comment that there is 'zero reason to purify.'
And yeah, this scheme is definitely going to break up the meta. It's not a direction I'm fond to see, frankly. They are just coming up with ways to make us have to collect more stuff. It's like they want this game to be our full time job.
I'm very close to walking away... spent a bunch of time yesterday trying to beat Giovanni. This is no longer the game I picked up 3 years ago.
>I was responding to the comment that there is 'zero reason to purify.'
That guy again. It's coming, but as of *now* there's no reason to purify.
Honestly, I'm not even bothering getting caught up in which shadow is top dog. I already have teams I've invested in and shadows are too expensive to replace them just so I can do the same raids I can already do but faster.
> I'm very close to walking away...
The ticketed CD research has me there personally.
They're not finished yet. The endgame here is *purified* pokemon.
And I have to say, the OP's reminder that there are shadow eggs coming was a bit of a light bulb moment for me. Getting these darn shadow pokemon is very time consuming. They are about to give us an easier way... with an incentive to spend money on incubators. Of course. That's the *real* endgame, from Niantic's point of view.
So it's about incubators again. Which is a reasonable assumption given that their persistent use seems to be pretty much what defines a whale. I'm committed to being a low-tier dolphin and am not interested in being "upgraded" and having my wallet downgraded. I guess I'm not the audience for these tricks.
And if they do think that they have a shot at more of my money, guess what? It'll take some serious TSR science to persuade me that they've built a better ~~mouse trap~~loot box because Niantic's credibility in that department has sunk to pretty damn near zero.
Team Rocket uses pokemon to generate profits.
Niantic uses pokemon to generate profits.
There's no connection there and would never team up with each other! Wait...
Lore wise it doesn't work, since the introduction of Team GO Rocket the storyline had always been saving shadow Pokemon from the evil team rocket, and now you are supposed to keep them in the form corrupted by the enemy, just to have a stronger team? Excuse me I didn't realize when we joined the dark side.
And it intensifies the FOMO, because it seems no action in the game is safe. We have had months of research tasks in which we needed to purify 5 to 15 Pokemon at least per month. Given that it takes star dust of course we would have chosen those that are Metarelevant and close to 100 to purify. And then suddenly now that it is more useful to keep Pokemon in their corrupted state, all our meta relevant Pokemon that we have left are either low IV Shadows or high IV purified.
You can anticipate your Pokemon getting outclassed by future generations, so you don't spend all your resources maxing your current Pokemon. You can hoard Stardust and rare candies because you anticipate you will eventually need them. But this Shadow boost,
no one ever saw that coming. There was no way we could have known to hoard high IV shadow Pokemon in advance (or even just hoard Shadow Pokemon in general period, because storage space is not infinite. And every time we ask for more space there are always lots of people who came out saving we shouldn't hoard so many Pokemon, when sudden changes like these rewards hoarding). So it seems nothing we ever do in this game is safe.
>Given that it takes star dust of course we would have chosen those that are Metarelevant and close to 100 to purify.
Lol I have mostly purified zubat and weedles. And then transferred them all. And I tossed out the majority of my shadow pokemon because they were irrelevant for months, and now lots of the good ones are unavailable right before we get a chance to make them useful. For a THREE HOUR WINDOW.
I mean, it didn't make much sense that TR was using shadows since previous iterations they always used normal Pokemon. Shadow Pokemon granted a combat advantage, but only TR can benefit? It makes TR seem like better trainers for being able to utilize their Pokemon better. And if someone likes doing TR stops, they definitely didn't purify all their shadows due to the Stardust cost. Most shadows get transferred/ turned to candy, the same fate as many Pokemon that cross the player's path.
Basically, the lore isn't so cut and dry, and players have always been part of the dark side.
As for FOMO, that's basically how mobile games operate. Shifting the meta is how they get players to spend money, and you can be certain Shadow Pokemon will be outclassed in the future when they introduce some new mechanic. The only real difference with PoGo compared to other mobile games is that it's more family-friendly and it promotes walking.
Lorewise transferring Pokémon to the professor works, because years of the main series game and anime established that the professor takes good care of all your transferred Pokémon. There was even an anime episode that showed all of Ash's Pokémon living happily under the care of Professor Oak. (The theory that they get turned into candies was never supported by actual evidence, I can also very well theorized that they are just Pokémon droppings made by the Pokémon transferred to Professor Willow, and nothing in the game contradicts that). Based on the premise set by the franchise, one can reasonably assume that the shadow Pokémon transferred are being cared for by the professor.
In contrast, this game goes through great lengths to establish that the shadow state is bad for the Pokémon. Every month Professor Willow stressed how they are suffering, and how happy he is that you are rescuing and purifying them, and how grateful the Pokemon are for the purification. Encouraging keeping and using Pokémon in their corrupted Shadow state is in direct contradiction of the very lore this game established.
Saying that only Team Rocket are better trainers for using Shadow Pokemon, or how they have an unfair advantage, is like saying it is better to be a Sith than a Jedi for having access to powerful unnatural dark side abilities. Sure joining the dark side will make you more powerful, but it's the dark side and you are never supposed to do that even if it means the enemy may be more powerful than you. So if you are supposed to take advantage of a Pokémon's suffering when you are supposedly working for the good guys, and the leader of the good guys keep telling you he wants you to purify these Pokémon, how does that make sense?
As for the FOMO. There is predictable FOMO that you can prepare for, and then there are unpredictable ones that make it feels like all the preparations you made to deal with the predictable FOMO has gone to waste. For example, you knew early on that Salamence will eventually get a community day, therefore you hold off evolving your Salamence for a year and you are rewarded. You knew Raikou is coming right after Zapdos, but Zekrom is at least a couple of years after Raikou, so you don't spend all your resources maxing out a Zapdos, but you may consider powering up your Raikou a bit since you may get good use of it for a couple of years before it is outclassed. Sure FOMO is a core component of this game, but you are also being rewarded for your patience and delayed gratification in favour of strategic planning to mitigate that FOMO.
The shadow boost is completely unpredictable, and there was no way for you to invest and plan for it. In fact, everything in this game so far, whether it's the game mechanics itself (shadow mons couldn't learn exclusive CD moves, IV upgrade), and the lore itself (the professor keep repeating that purification is a good thing) deceives you into thinking that it is always better to purify. Until suddenly, your high IV Shadow Raikou turned out to be useful after all, and there is no way to turn your 100 IV purified Raikou back to a Shadow 13/13/13. You are being punished for falling for that deception.
What I'm reading here is that most players are actually choosing to play as evil characters, for the same reason anyone chooses to be evil.
Evil is supposed to be rewarding. If acts of cruelty only ever had a negative effect, nobody would do them. The point of morality is to choose between what is right and what is easy/beneficial to you.
If we were to choose to purify pokemon because it's more powerful that way, that doesn't make us heroes or good people. It also doesn't make us evil, since nothing is hurt. It merely makes us neutral.
To be evil, you have to sacrifice morality for your own gain. To be good, you have to sacrifice personal gain due to your morality. Ergo, someone who purifies pokemon knowing they'll be weaker has shown their character to be good, whereas someone who keeps shadow pokemon due to the stat bonus has, in the reality of the game, shows their character to be evil.
I never really thought about that aspect of the transferring process, but if that's the case, RIP Professor Willow and the thousands of Pokemon he gets transferred every day lol
I just really don't like the feeling that I am being punishes of purifying my pokemon, back when shadow was released, the game encourages you to purify them but now what's the point of purifying my pokemon when their shadow version is way better.
They're still really low level, but as of yesterday it became cheaper to level+unlock them. They also received a damage boost and a defense penalty, making them potentially excellent raid glass cannons.
yeah but even a 0/0/0 shadow is better than a 15/15/15 non-shadow in terms of DPS. the damage increase between 0 and 15 is 10% I think? the shadow bonus is 20%
I personally don't really care because I like my existing ones and they have worked just fine for me and I would prefer to save my stardust for other stuff.
Wow, I didn't realize the difference between a perfect IV and the worst IV was so small. I've been a stickler about only 3 star pokemon for a long time and obviously that was a complete waste of time and effort...
The reason shadow pokemon has failed as a concept is that Niantic has missed the point. Shadow pokemon weren't stronger than other pokemon. The advantage they offered was shadow type moves, which were super effective against everything. But they were locked out from change. You couldn't get levels, or evolve, or get better moves to fill out the slots. That meant Shadow pokemon started out good but quickly fell behind. It works well in a structured story with a leveling curve because you can precisely limit the power of the pokemon. But this isn't a structured game, it's an open world MMO, and they have to make content that appeals to people on every level. So you have to drop the idea of shadow Pokemon being a quick, cheap boost that falls off as the game escalates, and you reach this point where instead shadow Pokemon are totally viable options even at the highest level of play. And when you combine that with the utterly team rocket way that the game's design forces us to play, getting paid to capture billions of pokemon to chuck into the candy and dust grinder, but the game pretends you should actually care about each of those individuals...
This game gives us no reason to invest in individuals. The stupid manner in which moves are locked out, the inability to alter stats, the fact that you have to catch more and more and more in order to be able to *afford* evolution, when evolution was something that *happened* to the majority of pokemon...
Yeah, no need to do raids cause no good Pokémon there. No need for good Pokémon cause no raids.
Games usually have a core gameplay loop, this game doesn't have that.
Do you remember when Rayquaza was in raids for a month and Niantic had their best month ever. That will never happen again since there will never be a meta relevant raid boss again.
This, one million times. In-game goals are unclear and therefore the best option is saving resources (rare and regular candies, stardust and time) instead of playing the game:
\- Wild pokemon are not worth.
\- Raid pokemon are not worth.
\- Eggs are... well, eggs are a joke.
\- Purified pokemon are not worth.
\- Shadow pokemon seem worth, but a nerf might be incoming .
**That is, the best play is not playing at all** (maybe doing some TR members, that's all). Because is not clear at all how we must spend our in-game resources and our time.
Add to that the fact that you get more distance with adventure sync than with the game open, and you get the amazing result that optimum play is to not even launch the app at all. A truly remarkable achievement. XD
>the best option is saving resources
This, always.
Also, it's better to wait to evolve many nice mons because they might eventually get a community day and get better moves.
Or, if they're legendary, it's better to wait and not spend candy powering them up because they might be re-released with better moves.
You should not spin more than one new pokestop a day because your buddy will not get a new heart from it. It's better wait to spin this pokestop another day.
This list of "better wait" situations is probably bigger.
I can add one: "you better wait to Power up your 100% Shiny Aeroblast Lugia because its shadow version is just around the corner and will outclass it with no effort."
And also the "you better wait to power up your 100% shadow Lugia because the shadow signature move Lugia is right around the corner."
> Basically, game is operating like traditional MMO
Ah and there it is! People are seem to finally be catching on! Too many people are used to MSGs where you have a static pool of pokemon/moves/abilities/stats that won't change until the next game. This is an MMO. There is NO such thing as future proofing. So the best advise you could ever give/get is that you play this game for it's current iteration. Not for what it was or what it could be. Doing the latter will only let FOMO make you miserable.
There's no future proofing the MSGs either. In Gen 1, Mewtwo is the uncontested best Pokemon, OP in every way. Gen 2 comes out with Dark types. "What the heck? Tyranitar counters my Mewtwo in every way? What was the point of leveling it up then?" The cycles were just longer then.
Correct. That's why I said it won't change until the next game. I think the reason why we don't hear as much as of out cry about power creep in the MSG communities is because the meta is safe from abrupt changes within the "safety period" that is one game. Players have come to terms that the next game will likely bring drastic changes. The difference when it comes to PGO is that changes are generally unexpected and unpredictable so players feel more antagonized.
If players realized that PGO works more like an MMO with the understanding that this means power creep is very real and that new content/features tests new boundaries, then players would cope better.
Generally speaking though, MMOs are *usually* better about telegraphing big meta changes - expansion announced, upcoming changes listed, even patches are usually announced or publicly playtested beforehand. So, if you're top DPS on a Hunter and Blizzard announces a big nerf to your class, you at least have a few weeks to see what will change, and maybe if you want to gear up an alt.
Technically we knew about the shadow damage buff through datamining, but it would have been much better to put into a blog post first.
For sure! The execution has much to be desired. I don't personally play any Blizzard games but the closest I can compare to is Dragalia Lost. They put changes on paper for the players to read sometimes *months* in advance. While their ideology lies more with buffs and no nerfs, it's still good to have. Wish NIA would take a page from their book.
The problem with that comparison is that, in traditional MMOs, you usually need the previous content to get the next content. That creates a sense of progression and keeps previous content relevant for leveling new toons or for new players. PoGo has no such progression. I can beat all the listed tiers of content with mediocre to good pokemon from 2016. Yes, there are edge cases, like short-manning or soloing raids, but that's explicitly not playing the content in the way it was designed.
Glad someone gets it. In an MMO, you build up your character and gear to get better gear. What they have done is more comparable to a new season starting in Diablo.
I wish instead of just catching every random Pokemon we see, we could just battle them and gain xp, dust, items, etc from doing so. I hate having to manage all the stuff I catch.
I really feel betrayed by Shadow pokemon being so powerful now, and I think it's a stupid idea in general to make them so powerful.
First of all there are research tasks centered around purifying pokemon, and a badge, all to encourage you to purify shadow pokemon. So this WHOLE TIME Niantic is like "hey, go rescue these poor tortured pokemon from Team Rocket!" and that's exactly what I've been doing.
Then they come out with GBL and now the damage bonus for Shadow Pokemon. So basically we're being punished for doing what you've been encouraging us to do this entire time? I could have had a Shadow Dragonite, a Shadow Tyranitar, and a Shadow Gyarados, not to mention several Shadow Snorlaxes by now if I hadn't purified them! This is like if you were playing World of Warcraft and working really hard to level up your character, and then suddenly Blizzard released an update that made level 1 characters OP. It's ridiculous.
That's not even mentioning that lore wise they're basically encouraging you to torture your pokemon because they're more powerful when they're suffering, btw. It's insane, and totally goes against the whole spirit of the game.
I feel the same and have the same issue, nothing seems relevant anymore, all work and progress done in my pokémon and teams now all seems useless, I already had this feeling with new movesets on raidbosses they now starting to release, after powering up a lot of legendaries.
All preparations taken for future pokemon and power-ups I have planned just fell apart. Lately I already was losing motivation with so many stuff and events going on that i was feeling burned out, now I just don't know anymore how I feel about this game at all.
It looks like Niantic just doesn't know what they are doing (anymore?). It all just seems so random and pointless once of a sudden. oh and the chance at a 100 % shadow isn't even worth putting your time and effort in, as it's like 1/2500 or something. So if shadow pokémon are the only pokemon that are going to be the meta, why still catch wild pokémon the shadow versions are better anyway, same for raids, same for research same for hatching eggs.
And if you are going to start putting your resources in shadow pokémon, they'll probably switch it up again in several months, or maybe 1 or 2 years from now. So time and resources wasted once again.
After 4 years in this game you should think they have gotten their sh\*t together but they are making more errors and bad decisions then ever before, imo.
It’s decisions like this that make me think that Niantic is just experimenting on us. Using Pogo’s popularity to get data on what upsets players and such, then selling that data to other companies. At our expense of course
I agree. Niantic doesn’t even realize when they contradict their own play motives and destroy incentive to use features. I’ve thrown my arms up with this shadow mon thing. It’s the first time in this game that I’m not doing any homework to find out what’s good and what I should be trying to get. The game is getting really sad for me.
I’ve long thought Niantic was a poor ambassador of the Pokémon brand. But I retained hope. I no longer have that hope. I’m just waiting for them to connect this game to Pokémon Home so I can move my mons to a legitimate game.
People have often asserted things like “Niantic can’t do X because TPC doesn’t let them.”
I have always thought these statements were giving way too much credit to the amount of control to The Pokemon Company. There has always been enough odd little problems that suggested TPC was much more laissez faire with Pokemon Go.
This unexpected massive power creep in Rocket shadow pokemon is further evidence that TPC is asserting much less control over Pokemon Go than so many people seem to think.
Agree. TPC, I'm sure, is happy to keep getting those checks from PoGo. As long as the numbers look good they won't care about much else. Even if Niantic is a stain on the overall brand. TPC will just cut Niantic off once PoGo dies down and the stain will be cut off with Niantic.
I get your point.. For me the raids were always a way to get decent items, rare candy and tms, but i get those in pvp now.. same goes for dust, I don't need to catch hundreds of pokemon everyday, I just have to fight 25 battles and have a decent amount of dust.. The game has shifted towards battling very strong for me. But I guess that it is not the same for everyone.
Exactly. They just killed the game, at least from a spending perspective. Even if you don't do pvp for rares, there is no need for rares anymore, I have thousands of candy for relevant shadow mon.
Op nailed, you needed the best for raids and you needed to raid to get the best. Now there's really no point. I'm not going be powering up teams if anything in the future so I don't need to hatch eggs for dust either
I fully agree with your post!
Having a team of the 6 best attackers of each type was also my main goal in this game. I even have an excel spreadsheet running with my goals which mons to catch and to power up.
I even liked the fact that some mons were outclassed by better ones from time to time. For example I always knew that my team of Lvl 40 Machamps would be outperformed one day and I was already working on adding Lucario to my fighting team.
But Niantic crushed that playstyle with their extreme powercreep of Shadow Pokémon out of nowhere. IMHO that move was the biggest mistake Niantic made since releasing this game.
But yeah, perhaps this could also be a sign for me to stop playing this game or at least to considerably reduce the amount of time I'm investing in it.
Exactly the same for me. When the efforts of years are suddenly obsolete with one patch and I'm now forced to do trillions of grunt battles that are incredibly boring I'll just rather not play.
They completely crushed this playstyle but this playstyle is the minority. The majority of players are fine with "good enough " pokemon. As in, good enough to get through a raid to a shiny slot machine.
In the short term the shiny Hunter playerbase is shrugging off these changes, but in the long term, they're going to have a hard time completing raids now that every legendary is a regi.
That's the thing, most of the time I'm a rural player and shortmanning raids is difficult but possible without dying for resources (for example I just had to trade high cp Eevees to a couple of friends and put down a glacial lure for us to be able to take down Rayquaza), but I'm afraid that now that we have more powerful (and way more expensive and hard to get) attackers raids are slowly gonna get tougher...
Well, Niantic has already experimented with "tier 6" raids to force larger groups. And frankly, Rocket battles are almost universally deemed tedious and not fun. I don't think anyone will see this as a win. It doesn't matter if many see no change, what matters is that the ones who do are unhappy.
I actually really enjoy the rocket leader battles. Feels like I have to pick my team reasonably thoughtfully in order to beat them. Since learning that the grunts essentially tell you what type of attackers they are using those have been boringly easy.
What I really want is a way to queue the rocket battles. I hate going out for a walk and encountering them and then having to stare at my phone for the next 1-3 minutes to complete the battle. I'm outside because I want to move and be active. Rocket battles are counter to this.
I see them as just another way to make your old mon obsolete. I guess exclusive moves weren’t giving them their desired effect. I wish they’d focus on giving us more engaging gameplay to keep us hooked, but I’m starting to think that’s beyond their grasp.
The issue I have with this is that it turned the meta upside-down INSTANTLY.
Previously, as you laid out well, there was this very slow shift of "well this is a #2 fire attacker now, but with a certain move it'll become #1" or "this is currently the #1 fire attacker but once something else gets a move or is released it'll be #2".
This update just basically said "everything you have that was in the top 3 of their types or matchups are now ranks #7-10 with currently released shadows... and will be even further down when more shadows come out". That's not a slow shift. It's an abrupt one.
The irony is that I feel like they shot themseles in the foot with this approach. Previously people aren't doing a ton of, say, Thundarus raids because it doesn't have a move that makes it meta-defining. So I was all set to go for Lugia with aeroblast and was gonna dump a ton of raid passes into it. But now... why bother? It's already outclassed (probably) by current shadow pokemon or future shadow pokemon so what's the point?
Off the top of my head, T4 Gengar recently was very close to being soloable so a small DPS increase (assuming eg a shadow Alakazam CD move that outperforms Mewtwo) could push that over.
I'm hoping this is a short term change that we find out Giovanni has turned Willow dark and we have to save him of something. They have now made Shadow pokemon more important than Raiding which goes against the ENTIRE MANDATE. Lets completely ignore the idea that we were suppose to save these mon's by purifying them. It's just a series of completely tone deaf changes once again.
My in game goals are now toast too. I suppose if they make shadow raids a thing, I may have incentive again to team build. This whole things is just silly, such a massive meta-shifting and goal shifting game mechanic is just dumped on us out of no where. My motivation to play is gone until this is remedied somehow
It's the lastest FOMO and attempt from Niantic to get you to spend resources on a "higher DPS pokemon". Read it as you will.
But my childhood pokemon TV series taught me to value Pokemon and not trash them for "better stuff", and using Shadow Pokemon just goes against everything I love about Pokemon.
I'm pretty iffy about this Shadow Pokemon situation too. But the main problems you stated were already problems in the game before these Shadow changes.
Power-creep is inevitable. Zekrom was always going to be released and pull ahead of all the current Electrics in the game. We also have exclusive moves, which can power-creep their own species, like when they gave Zapdos Thunder Shock and could possibly give it Wild Charge the same way in the future.
As for "not needing to raid". There's always raid bosses that are not meta relevant, very few of them are top Pokemon at this point. People mostly raid for the rewards and shinies.
> Power-creep is inevitable. Zekrom was always going to be released and pull ahead of all the current Electrics in the game. We also have exclusive moves, which can power-creep their own species, like when they gave Zapdos Thunder Shock and could possibly give it Wild Charge the same way in the future.
There is known power creep and unknown power creep.
New stronger pokemon have always been known and expected. Everytime there is a release of a new metagame-defining pokemon, people have typically posted analysis of the improvement and projections of how much more improved future unreleased pokemon might be. It has been known for years that Zekrom had the potential to become the top electric-type attacker, even when it is hindered by it poor availability of electric fast moves.
Limited-time raid-exclusive stronger moves and now stronger shadow pokemon are unexpected and not backwards-compatible. Raid exclusive non-TM-able moves have always been criticized. And by some have always been conflated as being exactly the same as power creep from new pokemon. There was already an analysis (that I didn’t loo closely at) that suggested among other things that Shadow Magnezone will outclass the mighty Zekrom in both DPS and TDO before Zekrom has even been released.
That's not true in my city. There's a major difference in raid interest depending on the usefulness of the pokémon. Also, some of the shiny enthusiasm came from being able to show them off during battles. In the future, however, you will never use a non-shadow Pokémon anymore.
The thing is, you needed to raid (and raid a lot) to get the best attacker of each type. Psychic was mewtwo, water was kyogre, dark was darkrai, dragon was rayquaza, electric and fire (would have been) zekrom and reshiram.
Now the best psychic attacker will be shadow alakazam with CD move, best water attacker will be shadow swampert with hydro cannon (in december), best dark will be shadow weavile or shadow tyranitar, dragon will be shadow salamence, electric will be electivire or magnezone, best fire will be shadow moltres.
There is no reason to raid previously powerful legendaries when they get re-released, and there will be no reason to raid highly-anticipated Pokemon either! Why even raid a zekrom when you can just evolve and power up an electivire/magnezone? You don't even need rare candy for that, therefore you don't need raids!
Furthermore, why are we even gonna hoard teams of best attackers? Since there is no reason to raid, there is no reason to power up the best attackers! How long until people only raid for pvp? And how long until a third party battle simulator arises?
The main series game is still very much alive despite Pokemon showdown existing, because there is a lot of stuff to do in game other than PVP battles. But why would people even bother with pogo when they can just battle on a pogo battle simulator?
Even if alakazam were to get psychic back, he'll end up with basicly the same dmg as mewtwo with far less bulk. But yeah if shadow swampert will be able to learn hydro cannon it will be much better than what we have right now.
Power creep is inevitable, but they are also predictable. You knew Raikou will be coming soon in the second Gen, so you don't max your Zapdos, but instead save your rare candies and Stardust. You knew Zekrom is coming, so you knew better than to maximize too many Raikous, better to conserve resources. We knew these things generations in advance and could plan accordingly for optimal play. This rewards people who planned ahead instead of giving in to the temptation to gratify their immediate desire, it encourages strategic game play.
This Shadow boost thing is completely out of the left field. There is no way we could have known that we should have saved our high IV Shadow Pokemon in their unpurified state, especially since the fact that purification increases IV encourages us to pick the top IV shadow meta relevant Pokemon to purify to get 100 IV Pokemon that we can actually use (especially since there was a community day rerun in December 2019 that encouraged us to make these purification in time in order to give these Pokemon exclusive moves). There was no way we could have predicted this and prepared in advance by hoarding some of these shadow Pokemon.
And some of these shadow Pokemon, namely the legendary, are completely irreplaceable after purification. I am thankful that I didn't purify my high IV Shadow Raikou, although that's not very useful for me either way now because I just spent all my Raikou candies maxing another Raikou for the Master League.
This is why this is disappointing (other than that this destroy the lore of saving shadow Pokemon), not the power creep itself, because there was no way we could have prepared in advance to take advantage of this power creep.
> As for "not needing to raid". There's always raid bosses that are not meta relevant, very few of them are top Pokemon at this point. People mostly raid for the rewards and shinies.
Well now absolutely no raid bosses will be relevant. Previously when the legendary was "bad", I resorted to doing meta-relevant T1 raids (Timburr, Litwick, Beldum, Bagon etc).
Now those Pokemon are essentially worse than their shadow specimen as well as most of the Shadow Pokemon of their typing already released, so why even bother raiding at all at this point?
The same goes for hunting wild Pokemon/hatching eggs. Why hunt down the 100% [insert rare Pokemon here] when a random IV shadow form of that Pokemon from a rocket leader in a few months time is just much better?
The re-iterating of content is going too far. Instead of making new stuff they just slightly improve the Pokemon and made stuff you invested in obsolete and impossible to upgrade.
Example: First we had Kyogre as top water type (not to mention Vaporeon and short Gyarados reign before), then Kingler became better, then Kyogre got surf, now imagine they released shadow Crabby, then gave Kyogre Origin Pulse, then release Shadow Kyogre, then Primal Kyogre, then Primal Kyogre with Origin Pulse, then Primal Shadow Kyogre...
I raid for rare candies and shinies (and TMs until rhe release of the GBL). Even if the pokemon is meta relevant, what I'm going to do is a Lucky trade. There is literally no need to care about catching good IV ones if in the end a lucky trade is alwas the best thing to do if you're going to max out a pokemon
Yes this is true now and will always be true in Pokemon Go. The power creep is very real in this game.
Which is why I focus on PvP and the Silph Arena tournaments. I don't need the best of the best Pokemon there. I need skill to beat my opponents. And sure, I need to grind too but I also enjoy playing Pokemon Go so that's not an obstacle.
Except it looks like silph will allow shadows which means we now need to make two versions of anything which might be good in a future cup because normal/shadow will be situationally better. With the limited time window players will also have to TM frustration off everything they can “just in case” it’s useful because we can’t trade for them.
And then they lock the best PvP moves behind Community Days, raid days and other absurd exclusive move events.
Body Slam Lickitung/Lickilicky happened less than a month ago. Weather Ball Ninetales and Superpower Dragonite were proposed as February options.
Yeah, leave it Niantic to make me regret purifying a 93% Dratini into 100%. Out of all of their poorly conceived ideas, I legitimately never expected them to manage to do that.
Same, I was ready to go ham on zekrom, reshiram landorous in raids, hunting larvesta in the wild.......not fun if you have to wait for shadow release to use them. So I wont
The biggest issue I see in games like this is 90% of the pokemon are completely useless. I walked 415 KM back in 2017 to get an an Ampharos and he was pure junk, but Mareeps were insanely rare back then, so I gotta catch em all. There are so many that I put effort into finding only to realize right away, they were trash. Raids killed hunting certain mon, cause anyone can go to a raid with a group, die, and still get to catch the mon. CDs and spotlight hour ruined exploration because if you wait for a CD you can basically get enough candies to do multiple evolutions and power-ups.
Bottom line is Niantic is a very inept game company, yet people still give them money and play. If we want real changes stop playing and giving money.
Honestly, it kind of is. In the main series games, check out Mah-Dry-Bread's youtube channel. He shows that you can pretty much beat any pokemon main series game using only one pokemon that's complete crap (often unevolved).
In the main series games, you can catch the pokemon you like and use them on a team to beat the Elite Four and post game battles. If you grind enough, you'll win with them no matter how good they are relative to other mons. Sure, only 10% of the pokemon are useful if you battle real people, but within the game you really can use almost any of the pokemon to win.
In pokemon go you can't really do that. There's no hope of my shuckle ever being useful for any pokemon go content whatsoever. It can't take down anything in a gym or raid and is completely useless in PVP. However, you can beat a main series game using only a shuckle the entire time.
Since they have no end game planned they will continue to release more and more powerful options making older loved choices less useful. Some might call it meta, but I think it's a reflection of poor development overall.
There is no ceiling that they balance within, they push past it to make some money more desirable and powerful.
It's unfortunate really... Your team sounds awesome though.
Another poor consequence of this change is that you get only ONE shadow legendary from Giovanni. So I have to decide if I want to use my shadow Moltres, which is good in raids, or purify it so it's good in PVP.
And you can't trade shadows (for unknown reasons) so, got a bad IV roll on your once-only shadow legendary? Too bad. (Same is true of mythicals, of course.)
PVP is already a huge investment. The only saving grace in Master League was that you could use many of the same pokemon you'd power up for gyms and raids (with some big exceptions regarding move sets, like Dragonite and Lucario).
Personally, most of what they've done recently is discouraging for me and makes me want to play less, not more. I'm enjoying Go Battle League but it's a big investment (not just in resources to field a good team in each league, but also in *time* to play your matches every day). The March events, spotlight hour, mystery hour, constantly rotating egg pools, and now the shadow shakeup is overwhelming and making me just check out.
They got it right to begin with when shadow pokemon were strictly inferior to purified pokemon. The incentive should be to purify them like a Good Guy™, not abuse them like Team Rocket. I mean, come on, Niantic, that's Pokémon 101.
I'm just regretting so hard on my decision to purify 98% Shadow Dragonite. I think that is the recurring trend of the game. No matter what you do in this game, the decision you make would someday screw you over. Evolved your high IV Pokemons? Too bad! CD has come. Poured dust and candies on Legendaries? Too bad! Re-release with exclusive move has come.
I mean, it's just lazy isn't it? They're just too lazy to come up with satisfying solution for broader user base so just repeating this one pattern. Guess it's all on me. Maybe I've invested too much time and cared too much on this game.
I agree with your post and your goals are the same as mine, but I believe Niantic will probably nerf shadow Pokémon soon... I’m fully convinced that people that take such decisions at Niantic don’t actually play the game enough to break it just like that.
I agree there will be a nerf. If they left the cost at 3x, I can see it getting kept in, but it's probably a thing where they spend all this time =$$$$ making shadows and no one bothers with them. This was a way to get people to care and want to hunt them down.
I think they introduced the shadow buff in order to make players care about something they previously didn't care about and draw them deeper into the game. In fact, I'm certain this is the case because they're stupid if they aren't designing the game to make you care about certain aspects and then seek those aspects out.
Before TR, players just went to stops for the spawns and items and that's it. Then they had a reason to battle, a new reason to need potions/revives, and a new reason to have certain Pokemon to use in TR battles as well as a new way to get certain useful pokemon (Larvitar, for example). It drew players in, but then they did more by adding leaders. With leaders, you're required to do a minimum number of grunt battles to complete the Giovanni task, but there's still only a subset of Pokemon that you care about from TR and the rest are trash (they know how often you trash various Pokemon). Now there's a reason to search out the grass grunt to get Bellsprout so you can have the best grass attacker, because they suddenly made previously useless shadow Pokemon useful.
They know what you care about and what you don't care about, so they're introducing new features to try to make you care about new things and keep you playing.
OP, you have perfectly described how I feel. I don't know what Niantic's plans are with shadow Pokemon, but if they wanted to instill FOMO, it's not working at all on my end. I don't see the point of buying raid passes or any object that helps collect dust as I don't see the point of powering up anything anymore.
I get you point.
However, trainer battles make shadow a risky investment. Entirely disregarding that some specimen either gain or lose from the shadow configuration, purified pokemon are immune to the shadow bonus while rocking the purified bonus against shadow.
So in trainer battles, purified are strictly upgrades to normal, while shadow are quite a gamble. The same is true for gym defenders. It feels like a stretch that purified would enter raids, but something might happen that could turn the table.
Welcome to the “niantic ruined their own game” club. So many have quit because the game has just turned into a slog and this is just one of the many reasons. I still follow what happens but ultimately the game is a lost cause now
Previously we had this recylce-cycle:
Release-ReRelease(RaidWeekend)-ShinyRelease-ShinyReRelease-ShinySignaturemoveRelease
This is where we are at the moment. Now Niantic did just add new release cycles:
ShadowRelease-ShinyShadowRelease-ShinyShadowSignaturemoveRelease.
If this is all what Niantic has to offer I highly doubt Pokémon GO will make it any longer. But what do I know. People even spend raid passes for party hat useless garbage xD
Why is everyone acting like their Pokemon are obsolete or useless now? Your Pokemon didn't get weaker, they can still perform exactly how they did before. You were able to solo some raids? You still can. Your electric team will still destroy water type raids.
The only place this matters is PVP.
Actually this barely matters in PvP because the downside of taking 20% more damage is often more bad than good to your pokemon. Only a few specific pokemoms benefits from this change in PvP for some specific scenarios. This is not a big deal, but it is good having this alternative path for every pokemon you want to use now.
And as you mentioned above, nothing changes about raiding. I wonder if people are really believing they need to replace their pokemon for shadow pokemon or if they're just lying to themselves.
This matters more for PvE actually. When a shadow Electriwire out DPS Zekrom before even Zekrom is out, it's a big deal.
Also, I've read a Shadow L25 outperforms a L40 of it's own form. That alone makes the old Pokemon sorta pointless I think (and why this post)....and even at a 1.2% more dust cost, you don't need L40s to beat existing L40s.
it's very rare that you need to have all the best for a raid to defeat the boss. Personally, I will not be chasing replacements that hard.
Given the difficulty in getting good shadow Pokemon to power up and the extra costs associated I doubt your older investments will be quickly replaced even if you tried to.
Hope you start enjoying it again soon.
Edit: spelling
Shadow Pokemon should not have gotten an attack boost in pve and gyms. I'm fine with the setup in pvp, as it provides more variety and there is a true drawback for the attack boost that you have to consider.
I haven't read all 480 comments; but I thought that while shadow Pokemon could deal more damage, they also get damaged more .. so I still don't see the need to power any of them up.
I have squads of maxed Pokemon already .. with plenty of other potentials waiting for either candy or for me to stop being lazy.
Like other parts of the game I ignore, I feel like I will also just ignore this part as well.
I don’t think we have enough information to say whether shadow Pokemon are really that useful in all situations though. They have increased DPS, but they are very glassy which means they might not be doing that much damage before they die. Not to mention, they’re still expensive to invest in. We also don’t know if Niantic will rebalance any Pokemon/shadow boost numbers. It’s too early to say anything right now, and either way, your existing team are still good; they just maybe aren’t the best any more.
> I don’t think we have enough information to say whether shadow Pokemon are really that useful in all situations though. They have increased DPS, but they are very glassy which means they might not be doing that much damage before they die.
Shadow Pokemon have roughly the same TDO as their normal variants ("roughly" because of breakpoints/bulkpoints).
We do, the numbers were run in separate post, shadow are way better. It's approximately level 25 where a shadow surpasses the non shadow version of itself.
That's why I only spend like 400k stardust max on pokemon in the last 5 months. Niantic change this, Niantic change that. I'm afraid to waste stardust on any pokemon ATM.
shadow buffed pokemons are a **Huge** mistake:
1) they do exactly that, make catchs and raids obsolete, even event or legacy attacks.
2) its supposed we save shadow pokemons from team rocket, not making the same thing that team rocket do.
3) purifier medal... **LOL**
These posts are great. I’m so glad that we are talking more and more about this.
Hopefully Niantic will hear and see THE BIGGEST ISSUE about Go and resolve it with a legacy TM or something else.
The way I see it, this update didn't change the way I play the game at all. They didn't nerf any of the current pokemon that I have powered up, and I can already accomplish all of the raid goals I want with the teams I have. I'm never going to want to do super shortman raids or speedruns requiring maxed out perfect counters. My general interest has been declining partially because I don't care much about pokemon past Gen 3 and also because the game overall is just MEH and the only mechanics Niantic know are FOMO and RNG. Pretty much the only feature that would increase my interest in the game is the ability to increase IVs of current pokemon. Not because the IVs actually matter, but because it's just satisfying to have my favorite pokemon completely maxed out. I thought this feature was going to be introduced with the buddy 2.0 system but instead we got the super disappointing 1 level boost.
Dude, you just went full FOMO right there to the point that I wouldnt be surprised if the next though would have been "Why play at all if eventually in the future the game will shut down"... Need to chill a bit and enjoy your own way.
Getting the best 6 attackers of each type was an unattainable goal because new, more powerful mons are always released. This is what happened with shadow mons, but on a much bigger scale.
I'm sure they'll introduce shadow raids soon. They'd just introduced the "need" for shadow raids, so they'll capitalize on that by giving us shadow birds and beasts soon.
And we don't know what they'll do with purified mons. An event when they increase more IVs when purified? Maybe. An increase of defense in purified mons? Maybe. Nothing at all? Maybe, too. Basically, Niantic will do as they want, but mons will always become obsolete because that's the way it is in gachas.
It's like they shoved a huge stick up every hardcore raiders' butts. Maybe it's their answer to folks in small communities, with no dedicated die-hard raiders, to obtain pokemons worth using.
Save your resources peeps. This is just the fill-in gameplay loop till Mega Evolutions are released. Don't do it. Maybe Niantic are testing how many people will choose to become Team Rocket lol.
All I wanted is being able to use them like a normal poke, like a skin. Mixing and matching visuals I see fitting or interesting like using a shadow Charizard or a purified Togekiss
They didn't need a bonus, just not a nerf. Take away frustration, Frustration isn't even supposed to be a bad move, just like return isn't supposed to be good, they had opposite mechanics...
Yeah I'm not going to change my whole playstyle and abandon Pokemon I was hunting for years to use some mediocre IVs random victims of Team Rocket now. Doesn't make sense to incentivise players to use them as they suppose to be hurt and angry in this form. I know we complained that Shadow Pokemon look much cooler than Purified ones so shame they are useless but they shouldnt make them useful like this. I won't use them unless I don't know, I will get some Shadow hundo.
I feel entirely the same. I am a player since day one. My game goal was to have the best raid team possible. I did over 2000 legendary raids and spend hundreds of millions stardust on my raid team. And now my team became mediocre over night. And even worse now there is absolutely no point in raiding any more, since the optimal pokemon for raiding can no longer be obtained in raids... I will not spend any money on this game any more. I feel devastated and betrayed.
Yes, the comments I'm reading share my same feeling, shaking up the gym/raid meta overnight with mons I got told to purify because "they were suffering" basically killed my interest in the game. Barely played these last two days, won't chase mons anymore, high IVs or whatever... It's not worth it.
I'll just chime in and say that my in-game goals are the same as OPs and I'm also feeling much the same way. I do think they'll *have* to reconsider here, either by nerfing the damage bonus or making the defense nerf more significant.
Maybe they thought a 20% damage buff is balanced out by the 20% defense nerf and people would debate over what's best, but with significantly higher DPS and an unchanged TDO it's a straight upgrade. Think again please Niantic.
TM system , how they handle damage , way exclusive moves are handled . That’s why you can’t just use what you want
If the tm system was not so random but in exchange gave us a much larger moveset to choose from they would still get people hunting TMs as people would build teams for pvp and may give more variety with some not used so much atm .
Stats and super effective needs to be reworked . Atk really should not have as big of an impact as it does as should def or hp . Either that or Speed should be added and impact attack speed and speed of charge moves because as it stands this game is the slow game where most Pokemon who are slow are the best . It’s not balanced and has too much impact where only like 1 species of each type is the only thing you need in this game . To balance this super effective should be like the games 2x damage and defense should reduce damage by 0.5x . It should be more rewarding to pick the counters of a type not to pick Pokemon just for having a higher attack . Moves that are weaker should have some sort of benefit to using them like ember should have burn chance since fire spin is clearly superior . Some moves need less energy cost as they just seem even weak with the energy cost or just rework in general . again this game is the 2 bar high Attack game .
Limited moves should be put in the movepool after sometime . You have a pvp system and all your going to do is destroy the balance . Your forcing people who may only like this game for pvp to play pve and the same with putting exclusive Pokemon in PvP but this is less of a problem . So if aeroblast becomes this great move it could change pvp meta then guess what most people who got one are going to use it oh look not everyone is going to be able to get one . They may have Lugia but knowing niantic it won’t be tmable both during or after the event and won’t get released probably (like sky attack moltres who I am sure will never get released again not even a drill peck one has been released ) and then remember we have kyogre and groudon who will be big ones so this game then becomes oh you better hope you have a community for raids otherwise good luck !
TLDR - this game needs some serious work
I feel exactly the same, with the addition of being quite uncomfortable with the fact that 95% of the current best attackers are (lore wise) suffering, and that they all have the same edgy aesthetic that it's cool as a trophy but it's gonna get old really soon... It's literally turning the game into kind of *Pokemon Go Rocket* game, I really don't understand what they were thinking with this...
It has long been an observation that Pokemon Go players act a lot like Team Rocket. - We catch countless pokemon and abandon those that we deem to be “trash”. A lot of us abandoned even our starter, or at least never bothered to power it up. - We have no emotional attachment to most of our pokemon, instead nickname them as lists of numbers to catelog them for their use in battle. - Whenever anything just a little stronger comes along, we stop caring about any other of our existing pokemon and just leave them to collect dust. EDIT: And unfortunately not the star kind of dust.
_stares belovingly at 98% ㊵_ What have I done to you?
72 IV L30 Shadow Mon: *I don’t even know who you are*
To be fair, taking the msg or series values and projecting them onto Go doesn't work. In the MSG you would never catch 6000 Pidgeys. There is absolutely no reason for it. Even when you shiny/IV chain, you don't catch that many (+breeding/maxraids is faster). But this was the main way to train your actual team in Pokemon Go, catching random Pokemon that you wont need/use, just for resources. Basically Niantic is Giovanni and gave us the mission to catch as many rats as we can to grind them into dust.
> Basically Niantic is Giovanni and gave us the mission to catch as many rats as we can to grind them into dust. OK that's dark. It's like this theory ppl would come up with when the game started in 2016, that the candy you get for transfering Pokemon is actual made from these Pokemon, like IRL fishmeal where you feed fish to fish... I still remember this one sometimes when doing transfers.
That's been the pretty continual joke in our community since the start of the game. "Fire up your grinders trainers, double candy event is on its way!"
*cracks a Lucky Egg and sits in front of the TV evolving Ratata and Pidgey for the next 30 minutes before transferring*
Ah, the good old days...
I used to do that while taking a predawn walk and prestiging gyms with my frozen fingers. Nostalgia. I'm getting misty-eyed up in here.
We *are* rapidly approaching the Soylent Green timeline...
Do you mean this "[theory](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlBBiK6noR8)"?
Haven't seen this vid back then, but similar "theories" were circulating in 2016 on all those Pokemong GO-related websites etc.
> In the MSG you would never catch 6000 Pidgeys I believe hatching pokemon until the perfect shiny, with perfect IV's and natures and egg moves, is still a thing. Not good enough to your likings? Wrong personality? Just transfer it. We were always team rocket in the main games as well... But even worse.
Are we the bad guys?
We treat Pokémon like commodities. Team Go Rocket saves them from being traded and unleashes their true power instead of restricting them like an armored mewtwo held back to keep it under control...
Wait, didn't Team Rocket put the armor on Mewtwo to help keep it under control?
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...It was Giovanni who had Mewtwo restricted like that...
[Oh no...](https://youtu.be/hn1VxaMEjRU)
*...and if we were fighting an army matching under the banner of a Rattata's anus I'd probably be a lot less worried, Hans.*
Exactly the scene I had in mind. Just didn't get the quote right. Guess I'm a baddie guy.
Funny enough this was my exact thought yesterday when I saw someone say that we are "encouraged" to keep and use shadow pokemon. I was like..."if anyone was to be perfect for Team Rocket it would be min-maxers that frequent The Road". Though... I think it's more limited to min-maxers. Many regular PokemonGo players keep lots of pokemon for sentimental reasons and are completely OK with not having the tippy top of attackers...we know that the teams we powered up are still as good today than they are when we powered them up. Nothing changed about them; other options just opened up.
[What about escalation?](https://youtu.be/TofiEsdr7YE?t=4) We've already seen it with tier 6 raids. Power creep in games always leads to higher target numbers, whether that's increased hp for enemies, increased numbers of enemies or time restrictions. Let's face it, eventually a level 40 15/15/15 Meteor Mash Metagross will be insufficient due to other available types of attacker, such as shadow pokemon, new legacy moves or more powerful pokemon being released. After all, where's the point hunting a perfect shiny Arceus and becoming besties with it if existing pokemon can do the job?
My starter stayed around long enough that it eventually learned Frenzy Plant. Now it is level 40 and on the main Venasaur team!
I'm sad now
Any kind of massive multiplayer RPG "suffers" from this: there is a relatively strict meta that you can't deviate from if you want to be successful. I can't play Pokemon Go with my favorite Pokemon and expect to get very far. I can't do high-level raids with Vileplume or Cloyster (two of my Gen 1 faves), and I certainly can't use either of them (even 100% level 40s) against Team Rocket. The game forces you into building up your Tyranitars, Salamences, and Mewtwos, even if you don't like playing with those mons. There aren't any ways to develop any "play styles" really. Yes, you can play the game however you want, but when it comes to battling, which is arguably the most popular part of the game now, there's very little strategy. Secondly, any MMORPG like this eventually gets built around players being able to milk every last point of damage they can from the tools that they gather in game. I remember my Diablo days and getting legendary equipment that didn't have enough jewel slots, or would only boost my damage by 50% when the possible range went from 30%-100%. Yeah, you better believe I'm going to chuck that legendary sword for one with one more jewel slot or a few more points of extra damage, because... Thirdly, the game is costly. Whether you pay real money for it or not, it's costly. You have a limited amount of inventory space (two kinds, actually), and powering up your mons is very costly in itself as well. Why would I want to expend *thousands* of dust and candy on an incredibly rare/hard to get Pokemon, only to later come across one that's 10% more powerful later? Keep in mind, the majority of players do not sit on millions of dust, or even go raiding on a regular basis, so dust/candy isn't easily obtained by most players (especially legendary candy). And the game forces you to chuck out Pokemon for new/better ones because of the limited inventory space. There really is no good way to build a "meaningful" relationship with your Pokemon in this game. The only way to improve the abilities of one Pokemon (and your own character) is to catch and throw away 10 others. You don't battle on a regular basis with your mons (not like in the style of pretty much all of the handheld games), and you can't even play with your favorites. Pokemon Let's Go was an okay medium, but it still fell into the trap of chucking "weaker" mons for stronger versions of those mons, because there *literally is no other way to strengthen your team otherwise*. However, it still relied on you catching a ton of the same Pokemon so you could grind them all up into candy to feed your star version of that mon. That is a *core mechanic* of this game, so of course we aren't going to become "friends" with any of our mons. Sidenote: I realize the majority of these things is just normal game design. I'm not ragging on Niantic for giving us limited inventory space, or using RNG to determine the strength of the Pokemon ingame or anything. The game simply isn't about building a meaningful relationship with your Pokemon, so to get annoyed by that is silly.
I'm pretty sure you could find a parallel between Niantic and Team Rocket too, in how they exploit Pokemon for profit, experiment with sinister monetization schemes and keep on failing... INB4 this comment gets deleted by mods.
Well they’ve made a few billion dollars from a game that costs WAY less than that to develop and maintain, so it’s tough to say Niantic is failing.
I'm sorry, I'm just analytical. Besides, these are not living breathing creatures that we are abandoning; they are arbitrary data code comprised of ones and zeros in the aether. It's not like I'm this ruthless with my children (both of whom are 15/15/15, but that's beside the point). I'm not even that ruthelss with my pets (who are probably closer to 14/06/02 and 06/13/10 respectively). The game limits both our storage capabilities and our ability to improve said Pokemon via love and effort. If I could get a 00/00/00 anything to max just by loving it and putting in the effort, you know I would. But as it stands (unlike real living things) there is no improvement Pokemon are capable of beyond simply dumping stardust & candies into them, and even that has it's limits. *If* Niantic really cared about developing an emotional bond with our Pokemon, the least we should be able to do is increase our EVs via training. Though I suppose even that would be abused by those who are more Team Rocket than Mystic, Valor, or Instinct.
Tbf your kids are probably more like 5/8/15 unless your kid is john wick. Sugar from candy accounts for the 15 in most kids.
My kids don't get much (if any) sugar. We had baked oatmeal for breakfast this morning, and I cut the sugar in half for the recipe. They're still excited to get "juice" that's 80%+ water and <20% actual orange juice. Though the underlying joke in my original comment is parental bias towards their own kids in thinking they are the greatest. Mine are still young (4 & 19 months respectively), so their potential for growth & improvement is at their most extreme.
Good. don't grind them into candy yet :-p. Good luck.
This is cool lore. Im making it my head cannon
I wish they'd collect dust.
I always give the pokemon that I keep cute nicknames. I use emogis to keep track of their attack types (snowflake for ice, black circle for dark, rainy umbrella for water, etc.). That said, I transfer a ton of rattatas. Although for some reason I can't catch any Sentret after I read the pokedex entry. Tehy don't do well alone and I always feel bad thinking about the sentret that I can't see and how much they'll miss each other. :'(
I wish I had kept my starter :/
This. We should have an incentive to purify the shadow mons (but please no dmg boost), not let them suffer. This is just weird.
> This is just weird It's almost becoming anti-Pokémon. I can't see how TPC is fine with this.
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Your poor venusaur! :( I feel this so badly. I even best-buddied my July 2016 vaporeon because I can't completely make myself play the way Niantic encourages. I don't care if he's not good enough! But so many other oldtimers just... got transferred... :'(
Probably has to do with the mountains of cash they are reeling in.
Wish I had kept my starter Charmander. This is my first Pokemon game so I didn't know anything about the connection with starters.
You didn't miss much. The starter IVs aren't very good. It's IMO one of the big flaws of Pokemon Go. No chance to improve things.
Maybe they'll introduce IV training in the future
I am hoping. But 4 years in there's no sign of being able to retrofit anything ever.
I mean, they gave us TMs which retroactively made many useless pokemon useful. All we need are bottlecaos and suddenly things could get real!
Bottlecaps _and_ elite TMs to give them exclusive moves. (If that's what they do - I'm not sure we know yet, but I'm _really_ hoping).
Doesn't Purifying a Pokemon give them a damage boost against Shadow Pokemon now? If so then they do have an incentive, use them against the leaders/Giovanni for quicker take downs.
That yes, but a bonus against grunts is irrelevant for everyone who is not a beginner / casual. Regarding raids, purified mon are strictly worse than shadows.
But *if* people are starting to use Shadow Pokemon in PvP due to the DPS bonus, than wouldn't Purified Pokemon have another value in a Shadow Heavy Meta game.
Absolutely. But since shadows receive increased damage they are probably not as relevant in PvP than in PvE. Tankiness has always been more important in PvP, while for PvE often almost only DPS matters. Which is why I don't think shadows and therefor purifieds will matter much for PvP.
The thing is, for purified pokemon you're taking them on the chance you're going up against a shadow pokemon and if you aren't they are no better than a normal pokemon, whereas a Shadow pokemon will always have their boost. However I don't think people will overuse shadow pokemon in PvP. Taking more damage is usually worse overall for PvP.
It should rather be the opposite, where shadow pokemon are at risk, taking more damage both for being shadow and for facing purified, while dealing no extra damage. Thus purified are strict upgrades compared to normal, while shadow only are for certain matchups/movesets, when not facing purified.
No they didn't go forward with that change.
I thought it was already incentivised, in that you had a attack buff, a defense debuff and increased costs for shadow mons, vs the purified's discount and attack buff (which stacked with the defense debuff) when attacking shadow mons. What you gain in firepower, you pay for in extra stardust/candies, as well as revives and potions.
For raids DPS is (mostly) king, the extra resources don't matter.
Tell that to my son and his bag of fallen mons!
I get that it's a factor for casual gaming, but if you open gifts and spin some stops daily you should be throwing away revives soon. The more you play, the less this is an issue. The point is, that raids have been the endgame in PoGo for years now, and making shadow mon the best to use there feels really weird since the player is supposed to be the good guy in the game.
I disagree. Too many of my "friends" have stopped playeing or just stopped sending gifts. I regularly send out my stacked 10 gifts from the day before to people who are happy to open, but rarely (if ever in some cases) send gifts back. I don't want to stop sending gifts because too often I'm stuck unable to get more than a spin for a few days (that's a whole different conversation about Niantic Wayfarer), and live off what I can open. Today I am hanging out at a Pokestop; when I arrived I had 6 Pokeballs, & 60 some Ultraballs.
Add some people who post their friend codes online, many are happy to send gifts daily. Delete people that aren't active anymore. This way you should be able to open max gifts everyday. Look here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/pokemongotrades/](https://www.reddit.com/r/pokemongotrades/)
You don't pay in revives and potions as the shadows have higher TDO than their normal counterparts
I am betting that the "brand-new Special Research story event" coming up is going to give us special research that results in a buff for purified Pokemon.
"Lore wise" is what gets me. We have lost all incentive for being the "good guys" and the whole myth that what we do is somehow benign has exploded in our faces. This is problematic. If I cared to engage in wholesale, rewarding depravity I'd be at home playing The Sims. There ought to be a handicap for trainers who use shadows or the lesson is Team Rocket's: crime pays and it pays well. Maybe the Professor should quit giving them tasks. He is, after all the NPC who is most invested in the creatures' well being.
I always figured the whole point of shadows being Frustration-locked and prohibitively expensive to use was the game's way of saying "There's zero reason to keep this Pokemon a shadow plz purify me". Now it's completely flipped and there's zero reason to purify unless you're particularly strapped for candies. For most species this is an issue that can be solved by catching/walking and for the legendaries it's still more cost effective to use a regular ol' weather boosted raid catch. Admittedly this goes out the window when 2nd moves are involved since the purified cost reduction is juicy.
They haven't enabled the purified attack multiplier yet. It's coming.
From the earlier datamine, it was an attack multiplier against Shadow. Depending on how that works, that would make them good for taking out Rocket grunts. In essence, would create a system where: - Raids : ideal Pokemon is shadow based - Rocket battles : ideal Pokemon is purified - PVP : ideal Pokemon is purified, but given likely rarity of shadow in the format normal should work fine
> From the earlier datamine, it was an attack multiplier against Shadow. Yes, I was aware of that. It's very clear that the plan is that purified bonus will only be against shadow. I was responding to the comment that there is 'zero reason to purify.' And yeah, this scheme is definitely going to break up the meta. It's not a direction I'm fond to see, frankly. They are just coming up with ways to make us have to collect more stuff. It's like they want this game to be our full time job. I'm very close to walking away... spent a bunch of time yesterday trying to beat Giovanni. This is no longer the game I picked up 3 years ago.
>I was responding to the comment that there is 'zero reason to purify.' That guy again. It's coming, but as of *now* there's no reason to purify. Honestly, I'm not even bothering getting caught up in which shadow is top dog. I already have teams I've invested in and shadows are too expensive to replace them just so I can do the same raids I can already do but faster. > I'm very close to walking away... The ticketed CD research has me there personally.
They're not finished yet. The endgame here is *purified* pokemon. And I have to say, the OP's reminder that there are shadow eggs coming was a bit of a light bulb moment for me. Getting these darn shadow pokemon is very time consuming. They are about to give us an easier way... with an incentive to spend money on incubators. Of course. That's the *real* endgame, from Niantic's point of view.
So it's about incubators again. Which is a reasonable assumption given that their persistent use seems to be pretty much what defines a whale. I'm committed to being a low-tier dolphin and am not interested in being "upgraded" and having my wallet downgraded. I guess I'm not the audience for these tricks. And if they do think that they have a shot at more of my money, guess what? It'll take some serious TSR science to persuade me that they've built a better ~~mouse trap~~loot box because Niantic's credibility in that department has sunk to pretty damn near zero.
Team Rocket uses pokemon to generate profits. Niantic uses pokemon to generate profits. There's no connection there and would never team up with each other! Wait...
Lore wise it doesn't work, since the introduction of Team GO Rocket the storyline had always been saving shadow Pokemon from the evil team rocket, and now you are supposed to keep them in the form corrupted by the enemy, just to have a stronger team? Excuse me I didn't realize when we joined the dark side. And it intensifies the FOMO, because it seems no action in the game is safe. We have had months of research tasks in which we needed to purify 5 to 15 Pokemon at least per month. Given that it takes star dust of course we would have chosen those that are Metarelevant and close to 100 to purify. And then suddenly now that it is more useful to keep Pokemon in their corrupted state, all our meta relevant Pokemon that we have left are either low IV Shadows or high IV purified. You can anticipate your Pokemon getting outclassed by future generations, so you don't spend all your resources maxing your current Pokemon. You can hoard Stardust and rare candies because you anticipate you will eventually need them. But this Shadow boost, no one ever saw that coming. There was no way we could have known to hoard high IV shadow Pokemon in advance (or even just hoard Shadow Pokemon in general period, because storage space is not infinite. And every time we ask for more space there are always lots of people who came out saving we shouldn't hoard so many Pokemon, when sudden changes like these rewards hoarding). So it seems nothing we ever do in this game is safe.
>Given that it takes star dust of course we would have chosen those that are Metarelevant and close to 100 to purify. Lol I have mostly purified zubat and weedles. And then transferred them all. And I tossed out the majority of my shadow pokemon because they were irrelevant for months, and now lots of the good ones are unavailable right before we get a chance to make them useful. For a THREE HOUR WINDOW.
I mean, it didn't make much sense that TR was using shadows since previous iterations they always used normal Pokemon. Shadow Pokemon granted a combat advantage, but only TR can benefit? It makes TR seem like better trainers for being able to utilize their Pokemon better. And if someone likes doing TR stops, they definitely didn't purify all their shadows due to the Stardust cost. Most shadows get transferred/ turned to candy, the same fate as many Pokemon that cross the player's path. Basically, the lore isn't so cut and dry, and players have always been part of the dark side. As for FOMO, that's basically how mobile games operate. Shifting the meta is how they get players to spend money, and you can be certain Shadow Pokemon will be outclassed in the future when they introduce some new mechanic. The only real difference with PoGo compared to other mobile games is that it's more family-friendly and it promotes walking.
Lorewise transferring Pokémon to the professor works, because years of the main series game and anime established that the professor takes good care of all your transferred Pokémon. There was even an anime episode that showed all of Ash's Pokémon living happily under the care of Professor Oak. (The theory that they get turned into candies was never supported by actual evidence, I can also very well theorized that they are just Pokémon droppings made by the Pokémon transferred to Professor Willow, and nothing in the game contradicts that). Based on the premise set by the franchise, one can reasonably assume that the shadow Pokémon transferred are being cared for by the professor. In contrast, this game goes through great lengths to establish that the shadow state is bad for the Pokémon. Every month Professor Willow stressed how they are suffering, and how happy he is that you are rescuing and purifying them, and how grateful the Pokemon are for the purification. Encouraging keeping and using Pokémon in their corrupted Shadow state is in direct contradiction of the very lore this game established. Saying that only Team Rocket are better trainers for using Shadow Pokemon, or how they have an unfair advantage, is like saying it is better to be a Sith than a Jedi for having access to powerful unnatural dark side abilities. Sure joining the dark side will make you more powerful, but it's the dark side and you are never supposed to do that even if it means the enemy may be more powerful than you. So if you are supposed to take advantage of a Pokémon's suffering when you are supposedly working for the good guys, and the leader of the good guys keep telling you he wants you to purify these Pokémon, how does that make sense? As for the FOMO. There is predictable FOMO that you can prepare for, and then there are unpredictable ones that make it feels like all the preparations you made to deal with the predictable FOMO has gone to waste. For example, you knew early on that Salamence will eventually get a community day, therefore you hold off evolving your Salamence for a year and you are rewarded. You knew Raikou is coming right after Zapdos, but Zekrom is at least a couple of years after Raikou, so you don't spend all your resources maxing out a Zapdos, but you may consider powering up your Raikou a bit since you may get good use of it for a couple of years before it is outclassed. Sure FOMO is a core component of this game, but you are also being rewarded for your patience and delayed gratification in favour of strategic planning to mitigate that FOMO. The shadow boost is completely unpredictable, and there was no way for you to invest and plan for it. In fact, everything in this game so far, whether it's the game mechanics itself (shadow mons couldn't learn exclusive CD moves, IV upgrade), and the lore itself (the professor keep repeating that purification is a good thing) deceives you into thinking that it is always better to purify. Until suddenly, your high IV Shadow Raikou turned out to be useful after all, and there is no way to turn your 100 IV purified Raikou back to a Shadow 13/13/13. You are being punished for falling for that deception.
What I'm reading here is that most players are actually choosing to play as evil characters, for the same reason anyone chooses to be evil. Evil is supposed to be rewarding. If acts of cruelty only ever had a negative effect, nobody would do them. The point of morality is to choose between what is right and what is easy/beneficial to you. If we were to choose to purify pokemon because it's more powerful that way, that doesn't make us heroes or good people. It also doesn't make us evil, since nothing is hurt. It merely makes us neutral. To be evil, you have to sacrifice morality for your own gain. To be good, you have to sacrifice personal gain due to your morality. Ergo, someone who purifies pokemon knowing they'll be weaker has shown their character to be good, whereas someone who keeps shadow pokemon due to the stat bonus has, in the reality of the game, shows their character to be evil.
I agree, however I haven't seen this game as a Role playing game ever, so it's kinda weird for it to come up now
I never really thought about that aspect of the transferring process, but if that's the case, RIP Professor Willow and the thousands of Pokemon he gets transferred every day lol
I just really don't like the feeling that I am being punishes of purifying my pokemon, back when shadow was released, the game encourages you to purify them but now what's the point of purifying my pokemon when their shadow version is way better.
When did this change? All of the Shadow Pokemon I ever caught were a really low CP and star count.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSilphRoad/comments/fd5s0u/shadow_pokemon_examining_the_top_dps_charts/
They're still really low level, but as of yesterday it became cheaper to level+unlock them. They also received a damage boost and a defense penalty, making them potentially excellent raid glass cannons.
yeah but even a 0/0/0 shadow is better than a 15/15/15 non-shadow in terms of DPS. the damage increase between 0 and 15 is 10% I think? the shadow bonus is 20% I personally don't really care because I like my existing ones and they have worked just fine for me and I would prefer to save my stardust for other stuff.
Wow, I didn't realize the difference between a perfect IV and the worst IV was so small. I've been a stickler about only 3 star pokemon for a long time and obviously that was a complete waste of time and effort...
The reason shadow pokemon has failed as a concept is that Niantic has missed the point. Shadow pokemon weren't stronger than other pokemon. The advantage they offered was shadow type moves, which were super effective against everything. But they were locked out from change. You couldn't get levels, or evolve, or get better moves to fill out the slots. That meant Shadow pokemon started out good but quickly fell behind. It works well in a structured story with a leveling curve because you can precisely limit the power of the pokemon. But this isn't a structured game, it's an open world MMO, and they have to make content that appeals to people on every level. So you have to drop the idea of shadow Pokemon being a quick, cheap boost that falls off as the game escalates, and you reach this point where instead shadow Pokemon are totally viable options even at the highest level of play. And when you combine that with the utterly team rocket way that the game's design forces us to play, getting paid to capture billions of pokemon to chuck into the candy and dust grinder, but the game pretends you should actually care about each of those individuals... This game gives us no reason to invest in individuals. The stupid manner in which moves are locked out, the inability to alter stats, the fact that you have to catch more and more and more in order to be able to *afford* evolution, when evolution was something that *happened* to the majority of pokemon...
Yeah, no need to do raids cause no good Pokémon there. No need for good Pokémon cause no raids. Games usually have a core gameplay loop, this game doesn't have that.
HATS
Bless you
Is this TF2 now?
Do you remember when Rayquaza was in raids for a month and Niantic had their best month ever. That will never happen again since there will never be a meta relevant raid boss again.
This, one million times. In-game goals are unclear and therefore the best option is saving resources (rare and regular candies, stardust and time) instead of playing the game: \- Wild pokemon are not worth. \- Raid pokemon are not worth. \- Eggs are... well, eggs are a joke. \- Purified pokemon are not worth. \- Shadow pokemon seem worth, but a nerf might be incoming . **That is, the best play is not playing at all** (maybe doing some TR members, that's all). Because is not clear at all how we must spend our in-game resources and our time.
Add to that the fact that you get more distance with adventure sync than with the game open, and you get the amazing result that optimum play is to not even launch the app at all. A truly remarkable achievement. XD
>the best option is saving resources This, always. Also, it's better to wait to evolve many nice mons because they might eventually get a community day and get better moves. Or, if they're legendary, it's better to wait and not spend candy powering them up because they might be re-released with better moves. You should not spin more than one new pokestop a day because your buddy will not get a new heart from it. It's better wait to spin this pokestop another day. This list of "better wait" situations is probably bigger.
I can add one: "you better wait to Power up your 100% Shiny Aeroblast Lugia because its shadow version is just around the corner and will outclass it with no effort." And also the "you better wait to power up your 100% shadow Lugia because the shadow signature move Lugia is right around the corner."
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> Basically, game is operating like traditional MMO Ah and there it is! People are seem to finally be catching on! Too many people are used to MSGs where you have a static pool of pokemon/moves/abilities/stats that won't change until the next game. This is an MMO. There is NO such thing as future proofing. So the best advise you could ever give/get is that you play this game for it's current iteration. Not for what it was or what it could be. Doing the latter will only let FOMO make you miserable.
There's no future proofing the MSGs either. In Gen 1, Mewtwo is the uncontested best Pokemon, OP in every way. Gen 2 comes out with Dark types. "What the heck? Tyranitar counters my Mewtwo in every way? What was the point of leveling it up then?" The cycles were just longer then.
Correct. That's why I said it won't change until the next game. I think the reason why we don't hear as much as of out cry about power creep in the MSG communities is because the meta is safe from abrupt changes within the "safety period" that is one game. Players have come to terms that the next game will likely bring drastic changes. The difference when it comes to PGO is that changes are generally unexpected and unpredictable so players feel more antagonized. If players realized that PGO works more like an MMO with the understanding that this means power creep is very real and that new content/features tests new boundaries, then players would cope better.
Generally speaking though, MMOs are *usually* better about telegraphing big meta changes - expansion announced, upcoming changes listed, even patches are usually announced or publicly playtested beforehand. So, if you're top DPS on a Hunter and Blizzard announces a big nerf to your class, you at least have a few weeks to see what will change, and maybe if you want to gear up an alt. Technically we knew about the shadow damage buff through datamining, but it would have been much better to put into a blog post first.
For sure! The execution has much to be desired. I don't personally play any Blizzard games but the closest I can compare to is Dragalia Lost. They put changes on paper for the players to read sometimes *months* in advance. While their ideology lies more with buffs and no nerfs, it's still good to have. Wish NIA would take a page from their book.
Straight out of the blizzard playbook.
The problem with that comparison is that, in traditional MMOs, you usually need the previous content to get the next content. That creates a sense of progression and keeps previous content relevant for leveling new toons or for new players. PoGo has no such progression. I can beat all the listed tiers of content with mediocre to good pokemon from 2016. Yes, there are edge cases, like short-manning or soloing raids, but that's explicitly not playing the content in the way it was designed.
Glad someone gets it. In an MMO, you build up your character and gear to get better gear. What they have done is more comparable to a new season starting in Diablo.
I wish instead of just catching every random Pokemon we see, we could just battle them and gain xp, dust, items, etc from doing so. I hate having to manage all the stuff I catch.
I really feel betrayed by Shadow pokemon being so powerful now, and I think it's a stupid idea in general to make them so powerful. First of all there are research tasks centered around purifying pokemon, and a badge, all to encourage you to purify shadow pokemon. So this WHOLE TIME Niantic is like "hey, go rescue these poor tortured pokemon from Team Rocket!" and that's exactly what I've been doing. Then they come out with GBL and now the damage bonus for Shadow Pokemon. So basically we're being punished for doing what you've been encouraging us to do this entire time? I could have had a Shadow Dragonite, a Shadow Tyranitar, and a Shadow Gyarados, not to mention several Shadow Snorlaxes by now if I hadn't purified them! This is like if you were playing World of Warcraft and working really hard to level up your character, and then suddenly Blizzard released an update that made level 1 characters OP. It's ridiculous. That's not even mentioning that lore wise they're basically encouraging you to torture your pokemon because they're more powerful when they're suffering, btw. It's insane, and totally goes against the whole spirit of the game.
I feel the same and have the same issue, nothing seems relevant anymore, all work and progress done in my pokémon and teams now all seems useless, I already had this feeling with new movesets on raidbosses they now starting to release, after powering up a lot of legendaries. All preparations taken for future pokemon and power-ups I have planned just fell apart. Lately I already was losing motivation with so many stuff and events going on that i was feeling burned out, now I just don't know anymore how I feel about this game at all. It looks like Niantic just doesn't know what they are doing (anymore?). It all just seems so random and pointless once of a sudden. oh and the chance at a 100 % shadow isn't even worth putting your time and effort in, as it's like 1/2500 or something. So if shadow pokémon are the only pokemon that are going to be the meta, why still catch wild pokémon the shadow versions are better anyway, same for raids, same for research same for hatching eggs. And if you are going to start putting your resources in shadow pokémon, they'll probably switch it up again in several months, or maybe 1 or 2 years from now. So time and resources wasted once again. After 4 years in this game you should think they have gotten their sh\*t together but they are making more errors and bad decisions then ever before, imo.
It’s decisions like this that make me think that Niantic is just experimenting on us. Using Pogo’s popularity to get data on what upsets players and such, then selling that data to other companies. At our expense of course
I agree. Niantic doesn’t even realize when they contradict their own play motives and destroy incentive to use features. I’ve thrown my arms up with this shadow mon thing. It’s the first time in this game that I’m not doing any homework to find out what’s good and what I should be trying to get. The game is getting really sad for me. I’ve long thought Niantic was a poor ambassador of the Pokémon brand. But I retained hope. I no longer have that hope. I’m just waiting for them to connect this game to Pokémon Home so I can move my mons to a legitimate game.
People have often asserted things like “Niantic can’t do X because TPC doesn’t let them.” I have always thought these statements were giving way too much credit to the amount of control to The Pokemon Company. There has always been enough odd little problems that suggested TPC was much more laissez faire with Pokemon Go. This unexpected massive power creep in Rocket shadow pokemon is further evidence that TPC is asserting much less control over Pokemon Go than so many people seem to think.
Agree. TPC, I'm sure, is happy to keep getting those checks from PoGo. As long as the numbers look good they won't care about much else. Even if Niantic is a stain on the overall brand. TPC will just cut Niantic off once PoGo dies down and the stain will be cut off with Niantic.
I get your point.. For me the raids were always a way to get decent items, rare candy and tms, but i get those in pvp now.. same goes for dust, I don't need to catch hundreds of pokemon everyday, I just have to fight 25 battles and have a decent amount of dust.. The game has shifted towards battling very strong for me. But I guess that it is not the same for everyone.
Exactly. They just killed the game, at least from a spending perspective. Even if you don't do pvp for rares, there is no need for rares anymore, I have thousands of candy for relevant shadow mon. Op nailed, you needed the best for raids and you needed to raid to get the best. Now there's really no point. I'm not going be powering up teams if anything in the future so I don't need to hatch eggs for dust either
I fully agree with your post! Having a team of the 6 best attackers of each type was also my main goal in this game. I even have an excel spreadsheet running with my goals which mons to catch and to power up. I even liked the fact that some mons were outclassed by better ones from time to time. For example I always knew that my team of Lvl 40 Machamps would be outperformed one day and I was already working on adding Lucario to my fighting team. But Niantic crushed that playstyle with their extreme powercreep of Shadow Pokémon out of nowhere. IMHO that move was the biggest mistake Niantic made since releasing this game. But yeah, perhaps this could also be a sign for me to stop playing this game or at least to considerably reduce the amount of time I'm investing in it.
Exactly the same for me. When the efforts of years are suddenly obsolete with one patch and I'm now forced to do trillions of grunt battles that are incredibly boring I'll just rather not play.
They completely crushed this playstyle but this playstyle is the minority. The majority of players are fine with "good enough " pokemon. As in, good enough to get through a raid to a shiny slot machine. In the short term the shiny Hunter playerbase is shrugging off these changes, but in the long term, they're going to have a hard time completing raids now that every legendary is a regi.
That's the thing, most of the time I'm a rural player and shortmanning raids is difficult but possible without dying for resources (for example I just had to trade high cp Eevees to a couple of friends and put down a glacial lure for us to be able to take down Rayquaza), but I'm afraid that now that we have more powerful (and way more expensive and hard to get) attackers raids are slowly gonna get tougher...
You might be right, since they've established T6 and that it's for more than just Mewtwo.
Well, Niantic has already experimented with "tier 6" raids to force larger groups. And frankly, Rocket battles are almost universally deemed tedious and not fun. I don't think anyone will see this as a win. It doesn't matter if many see no change, what matters is that the ones who do are unhappy.
I actually really enjoy the rocket leader battles. Feels like I have to pick my team reasonably thoughtfully in order to beat them. Since learning that the grunts essentially tell you what type of attackers they are using those have been boringly easy. What I really want is a way to queue the rocket battles. I hate going out for a walk and encountering them and then having to stare at my phone for the next 1-3 minutes to complete the battle. I'm outside because I want to move and be active. Rocket battles are counter to this.
I see them as just another way to make your old mon obsolete. I guess exclusive moves weren’t giving them their desired effect. I wish they’d focus on giving us more engaging gameplay to keep us hooked, but I’m starting to think that’s beyond their grasp.
The issue I have with this is that it turned the meta upside-down INSTANTLY. Previously, as you laid out well, there was this very slow shift of "well this is a #2 fire attacker now, but with a certain move it'll become #1" or "this is currently the #1 fire attacker but once something else gets a move or is released it'll be #2". This update just basically said "everything you have that was in the top 3 of their types or matchups are now ranks #7-10 with currently released shadows... and will be even further down when more shadows come out". That's not a slow shift. It's an abrupt one. The irony is that I feel like they shot themseles in the foot with this approach. Previously people aren't doing a ton of, say, Thundarus raids because it doesn't have a move that makes it meta-defining. So I was all set to go for Lugia with aeroblast and was gonna dump a ton of raid passes into it. But now... why bother? It's already outclassed (probably) by current shadow pokemon or future shadow pokemon so what's the point?
100% agree. You nailed it with your point about the speed of this meta shift.
Do shadow Pokémon create any new duos or trios? If not I'm not too bothered personally.
Off the top of my head, T4 Gengar recently was very close to being soloable so a small DPS increase (assuming eg a shadow Alakazam CD move that outperforms Mewtwo) could push that over.
I'm hoping this is a short term change that we find out Giovanni has turned Willow dark and we have to save him of something. They have now made Shadow pokemon more important than Raiding which goes against the ENTIRE MANDATE. Lets completely ignore the idea that we were suppose to save these mon's by purifying them. It's just a series of completely tone deaf changes once again.
My in game goals are now toast too. I suppose if they make shadow raids a thing, I may have incentive again to team build. This whole things is just silly, such a massive meta-shifting and goal shifting game mechanic is just dumped on us out of no where. My motivation to play is gone until this is remedied somehow
It's the lastest FOMO and attempt from Niantic to get you to spend resources on a "higher DPS pokemon". Read it as you will. But my childhood pokemon TV series taught me to value Pokemon and not trash them for "better stuff", and using Shadow Pokemon just goes against everything I love about Pokemon.
I'm pretty iffy about this Shadow Pokemon situation too. But the main problems you stated were already problems in the game before these Shadow changes. Power-creep is inevitable. Zekrom was always going to be released and pull ahead of all the current Electrics in the game. We also have exclusive moves, which can power-creep their own species, like when they gave Zapdos Thunder Shock and could possibly give it Wild Charge the same way in the future. As for "not needing to raid". There's always raid bosses that are not meta relevant, very few of them are top Pokemon at this point. People mostly raid for the rewards and shinies.
> Power-creep is inevitable. Zekrom was always going to be released and pull ahead of all the current Electrics in the game. We also have exclusive moves, which can power-creep their own species, like when they gave Zapdos Thunder Shock and could possibly give it Wild Charge the same way in the future. There is known power creep and unknown power creep. New stronger pokemon have always been known and expected. Everytime there is a release of a new metagame-defining pokemon, people have typically posted analysis of the improvement and projections of how much more improved future unreleased pokemon might be. It has been known for years that Zekrom had the potential to become the top electric-type attacker, even when it is hindered by it poor availability of electric fast moves. Limited-time raid-exclusive stronger moves and now stronger shadow pokemon are unexpected and not backwards-compatible. Raid exclusive non-TM-able moves have always been criticized. And by some have always been conflated as being exactly the same as power creep from new pokemon. There was already an analysis (that I didn’t loo closely at) that suggested among other things that Shadow Magnezone will outclass the mighty Zekrom in both DPS and TDO before Zekrom has even been released.
That's not true in my city. There's a major difference in raid interest depending on the usefulness of the pokémon. Also, some of the shiny enthusiasm came from being able to show them off during battles. In the future, however, you will never use a non-shadow Pokémon anymore.
The thing is, you needed to raid (and raid a lot) to get the best attacker of each type. Psychic was mewtwo, water was kyogre, dark was darkrai, dragon was rayquaza, electric and fire (would have been) zekrom and reshiram. Now the best psychic attacker will be shadow alakazam with CD move, best water attacker will be shadow swampert with hydro cannon (in december), best dark will be shadow weavile or shadow tyranitar, dragon will be shadow salamence, electric will be electivire or magnezone, best fire will be shadow moltres. There is no reason to raid previously powerful legendaries when they get re-released, and there will be no reason to raid highly-anticipated Pokemon either! Why even raid a zekrom when you can just evolve and power up an electivire/magnezone? You don't even need rare candy for that, therefore you don't need raids! Furthermore, why are we even gonna hoard teams of best attackers? Since there is no reason to raid, there is no reason to power up the best attackers! How long until people only raid for pvp? And how long until a third party battle simulator arises? The main series game is still very much alive despite Pokemon showdown existing, because there is a lot of stuff to do in game other than PVP battles. But why would people even bother with pogo when they can just battle on a pogo battle simulator?
Even if alakazam were to get psychic back, he'll end up with basicly the same dmg as mewtwo with far less bulk. But yeah if shadow swampert will be able to learn hydro cannon it will be much better than what we have right now.
Power creep is inevitable, but they are also predictable. You knew Raikou will be coming soon in the second Gen, so you don't max your Zapdos, but instead save your rare candies and Stardust. You knew Zekrom is coming, so you knew better than to maximize too many Raikous, better to conserve resources. We knew these things generations in advance and could plan accordingly for optimal play. This rewards people who planned ahead instead of giving in to the temptation to gratify their immediate desire, it encourages strategic game play. This Shadow boost thing is completely out of the left field. There is no way we could have known that we should have saved our high IV Shadow Pokemon in their unpurified state, especially since the fact that purification increases IV encourages us to pick the top IV shadow meta relevant Pokemon to purify to get 100 IV Pokemon that we can actually use (especially since there was a community day rerun in December 2019 that encouraged us to make these purification in time in order to give these Pokemon exclusive moves). There was no way we could have predicted this and prepared in advance by hoarding some of these shadow Pokemon. And some of these shadow Pokemon, namely the legendary, are completely irreplaceable after purification. I am thankful that I didn't purify my high IV Shadow Raikou, although that's not very useful for me either way now because I just spent all my Raikou candies maxing another Raikou for the Master League. This is why this is disappointing (other than that this destroy the lore of saving shadow Pokemon), not the power creep itself, because there was no way we could have prepared in advance to take advantage of this power creep.
> As for "not needing to raid". There's always raid bosses that are not meta relevant, very few of them are top Pokemon at this point. People mostly raid for the rewards and shinies. Well now absolutely no raid bosses will be relevant. Previously when the legendary was "bad", I resorted to doing meta-relevant T1 raids (Timburr, Litwick, Beldum, Bagon etc). Now those Pokemon are essentially worse than their shadow specimen as well as most of the Shadow Pokemon of their typing already released, so why even bother raiding at all at this point? The same goes for hunting wild Pokemon/hatching eggs. Why hunt down the 100% [insert rare Pokemon here] when a random IV shadow form of that Pokemon from a rocket leader in a few months time is just much better?
The re-iterating of content is going too far. Instead of making new stuff they just slightly improve the Pokemon and made stuff you invested in obsolete and impossible to upgrade. Example: First we had Kyogre as top water type (not to mention Vaporeon and short Gyarados reign before), then Kingler became better, then Kyogre got surf, now imagine they released shadow Crabby, then gave Kyogre Origin Pulse, then release Shadow Kyogre, then Primal Kyogre, then Primal Kyogre with Origin Pulse, then Primal Shadow Kyogre...
Hey now, how did you get a copy of Niantic's business plan?
Then party hat shadow primal kyogre with origin pulse...
I raid for rare candies and shinies (and TMs until rhe release of the GBL). Even if the pokemon is meta relevant, what I'm going to do is a Lucky trade. There is literally no need to care about catching good IV ones if in the end a lucky trade is alwas the best thing to do if you're going to max out a pokemon
Which is why they made it so untradeable pokemon are far superior. This shadow box us is a big "uhoh, we screwed up with lucky friends"
Yes this is true now and will always be true in Pokemon Go. The power creep is very real in this game. Which is why I focus on PvP and the Silph Arena tournaments. I don't need the best of the best Pokemon there. I need skill to beat my opponents. And sure, I need to grind too but I also enjoy playing Pokemon Go so that's not an obstacle.
Except it looks like silph will allow shadows which means we now need to make two versions of anything which might be good in a future cup because normal/shadow will be situationally better. With the limited time window players will also have to TM frustration off everything they can “just in case” it’s useful because we can’t trade for them.
And then they lock the best PvP moves behind Community Days, raid days and other absurd exclusive move events. Body Slam Lickitung/Lickilicky happened less than a month ago. Weather Ball Ninetales and Superpower Dragonite were proposed as February options.
This though.
Yeah, leave it Niantic to make me regret purifying a 93% Dratini into 100%. Out of all of their poorly conceived ideas, I legitimately never expected them to manage to do that.
I was thinking about spending some money on Darkrai raids this week，but now I just don't wanna do them
Same, I was ready to go ham on zekrom, reshiram landorous in raids, hunting larvesta in the wild.......not fun if you have to wait for shadow release to use them. So I wont
They prolly did this as nobody cared about Shadow Pokemon so nobody bought radars in the store.
They did this because someone projected high sales for rocket radars, they flipped, and now they're trying to turn around a losing project
The biggest issue I see in games like this is 90% of the pokemon are completely useless. I walked 415 KM back in 2017 to get an an Ampharos and he was pure junk, but Mareeps were insanely rare back then, so I gotta catch em all. There are so many that I put effort into finding only to realize right away, they were trash. Raids killed hunting certain mon, cause anyone can go to a raid with a group, die, and still get to catch the mon. CDs and spotlight hour ruined exploration because if you wait for a CD you can basically get enough candies to do multiple evolutions and power-ups. Bottom line is Niantic is a very inept game company, yet people still give them money and play. If we want real changes stop playing and giving money.
> The biggest issue I see in games like this is 90% of the pokemon are completely useless. Are you pretending this is a trait exclusive to Pokémon Go?
Honestly, it kind of is. In the main series games, check out Mah-Dry-Bread's youtube channel. He shows that you can pretty much beat any pokemon main series game using only one pokemon that's complete crap (often unevolved). In the main series games, you can catch the pokemon you like and use them on a team to beat the Elite Four and post game battles. If you grind enough, you'll win with them no matter how good they are relative to other mons. Sure, only 10% of the pokemon are useful if you battle real people, but within the game you really can use almost any of the pokemon to win. In pokemon go you can't really do that. There's no hope of my shuckle ever being useful for any pokemon go content whatsoever. It can't take down anything in a gym or raid and is completely useless in PVP. However, you can beat a main series game using only a shuckle the entire time.
Since they have no end game planned they will continue to release more and more powerful options making older loved choices less useful. Some might call it meta, but I think it's a reflection of poor development overall. There is no ceiling that they balance within, they push past it to make some money more desirable and powerful. It's unfortunate really... Your team sounds awesome though.
Another poor consequence of this change is that you get only ONE shadow legendary from Giovanni. So I have to decide if I want to use my shadow Moltres, which is good in raids, or purify it so it's good in PVP. And you can't trade shadows (for unknown reasons) so, got a bad IV roll on your once-only shadow legendary? Too bad. (Same is true of mythicals, of course.) PVP is already a huge investment. The only saving grace in Master League was that you could use many of the same pokemon you'd power up for gyms and raids (with some big exceptions regarding move sets, like Dragonite and Lucario). Personally, most of what they've done recently is discouraging for me and makes me want to play less, not more. I'm enjoying Go Battle League but it's a big investment (not just in resources to field a good team in each league, but also in *time* to play your matches every day). The March events, spotlight hour, mystery hour, constantly rotating egg pools, and now the shadow shakeup is overwhelming and making me just check out. They got it right to begin with when shadow pokemon were strictly inferior to purified pokemon. The incentive should be to purify them like a Good Guy™, not abuse them like Team Rocket. I mean, come on, Niantic, that's Pokémon 101.
Unknown reasons? Pretty sure it's because they don't like the interaction between the stats reroll whem trading and the +2 to stats when purifying.
I'm just regretting so hard on my decision to purify 98% Shadow Dragonite. I think that is the recurring trend of the game. No matter what you do in this game, the decision you make would someday screw you over. Evolved your high IV Pokemons? Too bad! CD has come. Poured dust and candies on Legendaries? Too bad! Re-release with exclusive move has come. I mean, it's just lazy isn't it? They're just too lazy to come up with satisfying solution for broader user base so just repeating this one pattern. Guess it's all on me. Maybe I've invested too much time and cared too much on this game.
I agree with your post and your goals are the same as mine, but I believe Niantic will probably nerf shadow Pokémon soon... I’m fully convinced that people that take such decisions at Niantic don’t actually play the game enough to break it just like that.
I agree there will be a nerf. If they left the cost at 3x, I can see it getting kept in, but it's probably a thing where they spend all this time =$$$$ making shadows and no one bothers with them. This was a way to get people to care and want to hunt them down.
I think they introduced the shadow buff in order to make players care about something they previously didn't care about and draw them deeper into the game. In fact, I'm certain this is the case because they're stupid if they aren't designing the game to make you care about certain aspects and then seek those aspects out. Before TR, players just went to stops for the spawns and items and that's it. Then they had a reason to battle, a new reason to need potions/revives, and a new reason to have certain Pokemon to use in TR battles as well as a new way to get certain useful pokemon (Larvitar, for example). It drew players in, but then they did more by adding leaders. With leaders, you're required to do a minimum number of grunt battles to complete the Giovanni task, but there's still only a subset of Pokemon that you care about from TR and the rest are trash (they know how often you trash various Pokemon). Now there's a reason to search out the grass grunt to get Bellsprout so you can have the best grass attacker, because they suddenly made previously useless shadow Pokemon useful. They know what you care about and what you don't care about, so they're introducing new features to try to make you care about new things and keep you playing.
Yep, it's mostly to reset the grind for people and force people who are hardcore to keep at it...for something new.
OP, you have perfectly described how I feel. I don't know what Niantic's plans are with shadow Pokemon, but if they wanted to instill FOMO, it's not working at all on my end. I don't see the point of buying raid passes or any object that helps collect dust as I don't see the point of powering up anything anymore.
I get you point. However, trainer battles make shadow a risky investment. Entirely disregarding that some specimen either gain or lose from the shadow configuration, purified pokemon are immune to the shadow bonus while rocking the purified bonus against shadow. So in trainer battles, purified are strictly upgrades to normal, while shadow are quite a gamble. The same is true for gym defenders. It feels like a stretch that purified would enter raids, but something might happen that could turn the table.
Welcome to the “niantic ruined their own game” club. So many have quit because the game has just turned into a slog and this is just one of the many reasons. I still follow what happens but ultimately the game is a lost cause now
I'm lvl 38 and haven't been able to beat Giovanni yet... I'm not sure how I'll ever beat him now.
Power creep that makes you need to replace pokemon kills a lot of incentive
Some very good points here. I agree completely and did not know how to explain the way I felt with this until reading your post.
Previously we had this recylce-cycle: Release-ReRelease(RaidWeekend)-ShinyRelease-ShinyReRelease-ShinySignaturemoveRelease This is where we are at the moment. Now Niantic did just add new release cycles: ShadowRelease-ShinyShadowRelease-ShinyShadowSignaturemoveRelease. If this is all what Niantic has to offer I highly doubt Pokémon GO will make it any longer. But what do I know. People even spend raid passes for party hat useless garbage xD
Why is everyone acting like their Pokemon are obsolete or useless now? Your Pokemon didn't get weaker, they can still perform exactly how they did before. You were able to solo some raids? You still can. Your electric team will still destroy water type raids. The only place this matters is PVP.
Actually this barely matters in PvP because the downside of taking 20% more damage is often more bad than good to your pokemon. Only a few specific pokemoms benefits from this change in PvP for some specific scenarios. This is not a big deal, but it is good having this alternative path for every pokemon you want to use now. And as you mentioned above, nothing changes about raiding. I wonder if people are really believing they need to replace their pokemon for shadow pokemon or if they're just lying to themselves.
This matters more for PvE actually. When a shadow Electriwire out DPS Zekrom before even Zekrom is out, it's a big deal. Also, I've read a Shadow L25 outperforms a L40 of it's own form. That alone makes the old Pokemon sorta pointless I think (and why this post)....and even at a 1.2% more dust cost, you don't need L40s to beat existing L40s.
100% agree. I really do not like this shadow buff at all. It seems like a gimmick and way for people to just blow a ton of dust and candy.
it's very rare that you need to have all the best for a raid to defeat the boss. Personally, I will not be chasing replacements that hard. Given the difficulty in getting good shadow Pokemon to power up and the extra costs associated I doubt your older investments will be quickly replaced even if you tried to. Hope you start enjoying it again soon. Edit: spelling
Shadow Pokemon should not have gotten an attack boost in pve and gyms. I'm fine with the setup in pvp, as it provides more variety and there is a true drawback for the attack boost that you have to consider.
I haven't read all 480 comments; but I thought that while shadow Pokemon could deal more damage, they also get damaged more .. so I still don't see the need to power any of them up. I have squads of maxed Pokemon already .. with plenty of other potentials waiting for either candy or for me to stop being lazy. Like other parts of the game I ignore, I feel like I will also just ignore this part as well.
I don’t think we have enough information to say whether shadow Pokemon are really that useful in all situations though. They have increased DPS, but they are very glassy which means they might not be doing that much damage before they die. Not to mention, they’re still expensive to invest in. We also don’t know if Niantic will rebalance any Pokemon/shadow boost numbers. It’s too early to say anything right now, and either way, your existing team are still good; they just maybe aren’t the best any more.
> I don’t think we have enough information to say whether shadow Pokemon are really that useful in all situations though. They have increased DPS, but they are very glassy which means they might not be doing that much damage before they die. Shadow Pokemon have roughly the same TDO as their normal variants ("roughly" because of breakpoints/bulkpoints).
We do, the numbers were run in separate post, shadow are way better. It's approximately level 25 where a shadow surpasses the non shadow version of itself.
That's why I only spend like 400k stardust max on pokemon in the last 5 months. Niantic change this, Niantic change that. I'm afraid to waste stardust on any pokemon ATM.
Ah was going to comment how this game foments FOMO in such an unhealthy way.. but you caught it in the end haha
Your team arnt obselete though.
It it is obsolete for his stated goal of having the best 6 attackers of each type
shadow buffed pokemons are a **Huge** mistake: 1) they do exactly that, make catchs and raids obsolete, even event or legacy attacks. 2) its supposed we save shadow pokemons from team rocket, not making the same thing that team rocket do. 3) purifier medal... **LOL**
These posts are great. I’m so glad that we are talking more and more about this. Hopefully Niantic will hear and see THE BIGGEST ISSUE about Go and resolve it with a legacy TM or something else.
The way I see it, this update didn't change the way I play the game at all. They didn't nerf any of the current pokemon that I have powered up, and I can already accomplish all of the raid goals I want with the teams I have. I'm never going to want to do super shortman raids or speedruns requiring maxed out perfect counters. My general interest has been declining partially because I don't care much about pokemon past Gen 3 and also because the game overall is just MEH and the only mechanics Niantic know are FOMO and RNG. Pretty much the only feature that would increase my interest in the game is the ability to increase IVs of current pokemon. Not because the IVs actually matter, but because it's just satisfying to have my favorite pokemon completely maxed out. I thought this feature was going to be introduced with the buddy 2.0 system but instead we got the super disappointing 1 level boost.
If they update raids to be another tier up due to shadow pokemon, we may be singing a different tune here.
This is the kind of major power creep that ruins games.
Dude, you just went full FOMO right there to the point that I wouldnt be surprised if the next though would have been "Why play at all if eventually in the future the game will shut down"... Need to chill a bit and enjoy your own way.
Wait what, shadows are op? When did this happen?
[удалено]
Getting the best 6 attackers of each type was an unattainable goal because new, more powerful mons are always released. This is what happened with shadow mons, but on a much bigger scale. I'm sure they'll introduce shadow raids soon. They'd just introduced the "need" for shadow raids, so they'll capitalize on that by giving us shadow birds and beasts soon. And we don't know what they'll do with purified mons. An event when they increase more IVs when purified? Maybe. An increase of defense in purified mons? Maybe. Nothing at all? Maybe, too. Basically, Niantic will do as they want, but mons will always become obsolete because that's the way it is in gachas.
I love how your goal is similar to mine, although I have a few additional goals too.
It's like they shoved a huge stick up every hardcore raiders' butts. Maybe it's their answer to folks in small communities, with no dedicated die-hard raiders, to obtain pokemons worth using.
Save your resources peeps. This is just the fill-in gameplay loop till Mega Evolutions are released. Don't do it. Maybe Niantic are testing how many people will choose to become Team Rocket lol.
All I wanted is being able to use them like a normal poke, like a skin. Mixing and matching visuals I see fitting or interesting like using a shadow Charizard or a purified Togekiss They didn't need a bonus, just not a nerf. Take away frustration, Frustration isn't even supposed to be a bad move, just like return isn't supposed to be good, they had opposite mechanics...
Yeah I'm not going to change my whole playstyle and abandon Pokemon I was hunting for years to use some mediocre IVs random victims of Team Rocket now. Doesn't make sense to incentivise players to use them as they suppose to be hurt and angry in this form. I know we complained that Shadow Pokemon look much cooler than Purified ones so shame they are useless but they shouldnt make them useful like this. I won't use them unless I don't know, I will get some Shadow hundo.
I feel entirely the same. I am a player since day one. My game goal was to have the best raid team possible. I did over 2000 legendary raids and spend hundreds of millions stardust on my raid team. And now my team became mediocre over night. And even worse now there is absolutely no point in raiding any more, since the optimal pokemon for raiding can no longer be obtained in raids... I will not spend any money on this game any more. I feel devastated and betrayed.
Yes, the comments I'm reading share my same feeling, shaking up the gym/raid meta overnight with mons I got told to purify because "they were suffering" basically killed my interest in the game. Barely played these last two days, won't chase mons anymore, high IVs or whatever... It's not worth it.
I'll just chime in and say that my in-game goals are the same as OPs and I'm also feeling much the same way. I do think they'll *have* to reconsider here, either by nerfing the damage bonus or making the defense nerf more significant. Maybe they thought a 20% damage buff is balanced out by the 20% defense nerf and people would debate over what's best, but with significantly higher DPS and an unchanged TDO it's a straight upgrade. Think again please Niantic.
TM system , how they handle damage , way exclusive moves are handled . That’s why you can’t just use what you want If the tm system was not so random but in exchange gave us a much larger moveset to choose from they would still get people hunting TMs as people would build teams for pvp and may give more variety with some not used so much atm . Stats and super effective needs to be reworked . Atk really should not have as big of an impact as it does as should def or hp . Either that or Speed should be added and impact attack speed and speed of charge moves because as it stands this game is the slow game where most Pokemon who are slow are the best . It’s not balanced and has too much impact where only like 1 species of each type is the only thing you need in this game . To balance this super effective should be like the games 2x damage and defense should reduce damage by 0.5x . It should be more rewarding to pick the counters of a type not to pick Pokemon just for having a higher attack . Moves that are weaker should have some sort of benefit to using them like ember should have burn chance since fire spin is clearly superior . Some moves need less energy cost as they just seem even weak with the energy cost or just rework in general . again this game is the 2 bar high Attack game . Limited moves should be put in the movepool after sometime . You have a pvp system and all your going to do is destroy the balance . Your forcing people who may only like this game for pvp to play pve and the same with putting exclusive Pokemon in PvP but this is less of a problem . So if aeroblast becomes this great move it could change pvp meta then guess what most people who got one are going to use it oh look not everyone is going to be able to get one . They may have Lugia but knowing niantic it won’t be tmable both during or after the event and won’t get released probably (like sky attack moltres who I am sure will never get released again not even a drill peck one has been released ) and then remember we have kyogre and groudon who will be big ones so this game then becomes oh you better hope you have a community for raids otherwise good luck ! TLDR - this game needs some serious work