Gigantamax battles have taken Pokémon GO by storm in… err… not such a good way! With these bouts turning out to be extremely difficult even with a lobby of 30+ trainers, and the fact that they can’t be remotely battled, GMax is getting slammed left and right by the player community.
However, there are also trainers who are getting them done and successfully adding these GMax Pokémon to their teams.
Now, an active player with an established community has shared his experience with GMax, which exceptionally highlights an unbiased POV on Gigantamax in Pokémon GO. The player in question is MrAvalanche, who hails from the suburbs of London and tags along with a community that’s neither urban nor rural, resulting in a “non-city” perspective.
This is his story.
The Pokémon GO Gigantamax conundrum, told firsthand by trainer MrAvalanche
“I play within a community that isn’t a city or a rural community I’d say we sit perfectly in the middle, we have a mixture of local casual players who make up the majority of the community and a handful of players who are willing to play with premium items.”
MrAvalanche makes it clear that he did all he could to prepare himself and his community for the grueling battles. “To start, I should preface that as a ‘raider,’ I gave the advice over a week prior to start building a Charizard using Max particles which can be acquired for free, but on a limited amount per day, I then reminded them on Friday that people should keep their MP to be able to do 2 Gigantamax battles on Saturday as they cost 800MP a shot.”
First up, it was GMax Venusaur.
“Going into our first battle of the day we started with Venusaur, we had 38 trainers for it, and it was instantly obvious that this was not going to be an easy activity for smaller communities, we took around 6 minutes to complete the battle.
The first thing I took away after that battle was that these mons should be easier to catch, there’s no incentive for people to grind resources to not even get the mon at the end of the battle is just plain wrong.
Sadly this first battle is where people started to drop off as they hadn’t kept the extra MP from the day before, so we lost a chunk of our team after just one battle.”
With GMax Venusaur in the kitty, the group of trainers then went to challenge GMax Blastoise!
“From there we went onto Blastoise using the Venusaur we had just caught, some players invested the premium particles into the newly caught Venusaurs so as to make it easier for the rest of the trainers. It went down without a problem with around 28 players.
Now this is where the problems began, max battle number 3 we were down to under 20 players and it was glaringly obvious, it was taking longer to defeat them and we were not doing as much damage as before, however we were able to learn valuable lessons, and arguably ( in my opinion the most important take away ) healers are KEY. Without healers these would be near on impossible to defeat.”
At this point, it dawned upon the entourage that while offense was crucial, health was equally vital.
MrAvalanche explains, “With fewer people, we were taking more damage and dealing way less damage. Health is key. Chipping away slowly is better than chunking and fainting fast. We were quickly able to realize that using the UI we could see the other party members health.”
He emphasizes, “You can have a maximum of 40 trainers within a battle, split into parties of 4, based on entry to the battle, this is key to know if you are operating with low numbers of trainers.”
Explaining further, MrAvalanche adds:
“As the battles went on we saw numbers fall, by battle number 4 we were down to 16 trainers, 4 parties of 4 trainers. So we had no choice but to use tactics, what we started to do was timing trainers going into battle to ensure we had one trainer per team who had a Dynamax/Gigantamax mon that had Max Spirit. This proved pivotal to continuing.”
“We found that putting a burner mon at the front of the parties helped, as for some reason Gigantamax mons spam charge moves at the start, so we had to sacrifice a mon to bring in our more ready-for-battle mons, from there on we used the UI when we went into Dynamax/Gigantamax mode, and used the icons at the top of the screen to see the health of our fellow trainers. If it was below half, our healers would heal three times over while the others attacked, it’s worth noting here that we found the max guard was useless and did not provide resistance at all,” he stated while stressing on saving MP.
“We rinsed and repeated this method, however with 16, Venusaur was not doable, we failed 3 times with 16 trainers and left it alone and went after Gigantamax Charizard and Blastoise.”
MrAvalanche knew that his focus on healers was spot on. “As we got to the back end of the grind we were down to 12, these were extremely difficult and required us to have 2 healers per party otherwise you would faint out due to lack of health. So yes healers are key!”
Ultimately, the group managed to do 10 battles in 2 hours and 45 minutes. With this, it’s now time for…
Gigantamax Raids: The good, the bad, and the ugly
The Good 😀
- It was great seeing the community out and about and actively having to engage in conversation to reach an end goal
- Pokémon GO has been long overdue a “challenge mode” for battles/raids so it’s very exciting to see it active and going
- Refreshing every hour was very nice and should be the case going forward, it meant once you complete your cycle, you were able to carry on completing them if you desired
The Bad 😐
- 800 MP per battle, when you can only collect 800 (without mid-maxing gains up to around 1100,) is just not sustainable and honestly just looks like a terrible cash cow for people to purchase MP from the store ( which works out more expensive than raid passes )
- Max Guard does not work as intended and is a waste of a precious move to use as well as resources to unlock it
- Dodging is so inconsistent you end up taking attacks even when dodging consecutively which in the later stages of battles is the difference between winning and losing.
The Ugly 😡
- Rural players have absolutely no chance of completing these, with over 20 players with powered-up mons necessary, it’s just not feasible. So, players should be allowed to remote in from invites as long as the person inviting them is located in person.
- It’s too resource-heavy to power up mons to be able to have a viable team to battle, local players were reluctant to spend candy and candy XL to level up bad IV mons abilities, this needs a big rework
- There is quite frankly no reason to do these battles. It’s a cosmetic reward with no overworld return, unlike Mega Evolutions when you can earn extra candies for example, so people are not interested in taking on the battles because their is no reward for doing so.
- It just takes too many people even for a challenge mode. Players need to organize a specific time to do this, and it means people missed out because without the numbers they cannot do them. Maybe implement a scaling feature based on a minimum number of trainers.
- The glitches again. Pokémon GO has been tainted by features released with bugs, spam attacks, trainers crashing out of battles at random moments when every number counts, shields not working as intended. It’s just not good enough when the intention is to build a feature that brings players back to the game.
Parting words
It’s no secret that Gigantamax Raids have been a huge mess and Niantic needs to rework this popular mechanic ASAP.
MrAvalanche, who painstakingly took on these battles and shared his experience in detail summarizes it all by stating, “This is a welcomed challenging feature that has been implemented in an ignorant way, and pushes out rural players AGAIN, and that it’s too ‘pricey’ to do without a premium pay wall.”
Let’s hope experiences like this are taken seriously and Gigantamax gets a much-needed revamp in Pokémon GO.