Earlier today was a wild ride Trainers, and we have some news to tell! There is a new Box Sale, EX Raid potential gyms are marked with a tag, and Mewtwo has some new moves!
Update: A previous version of this article had listed that raid eggs were back to a 60 minute to 45 minute split between egg and raid time, respectively. However, this in itself was a glitch and instead Mewtwo appears to be keeping the 15 minute egg and 90 minute raid time.)
Mewtwo With Flamethrower, Ice Beam, and Thunderbolt!
As you most likely saw in a previous announcement, Mewtwo would be losing its access to Shadow Ball and Hyper Beam come today, which it indeed has, leaving some to question whether it would receive new moves to compensate, as it would then only have access to Focus Blast and Psychic. Well, Niantic answered with a odd choice to say the least. Instead of a additional Psychic move such as Psyshock or its signature Psystrike, they gave it three two-bar charged moves that oddly enough follow the typing of the legendary birds: Fire in Flamethrower, Electric in Thunderbolt, and Ice in Ice Beam.
While a full analysis will follow, what I can tell you from a general impression is this is not as terrible as you might initially think. Thunderbolt is a good move, only outclassed by Wild Charge, so something with as high of an attack as Mewtwo might make a decent generalist. Not to mention, there are really no good ice types in the meta, Jynx is too weak so its good damage is countered by is frailty, Articuno does not have the greatest of attack, and we do not speak of Regice, so an Ice Beam Mewtwo actually makes for one of the best Ice attackers in the game right now. Flamethrower seems to be the least useful of the bunch. As a move it is indeed better than Ice Beam, but we already have the likes of Moltres, Entei, and Blast Burn Charizard doling out high attack, STAB (Same Type Attack Bonus) Fire moves so there is not a big niche Mewtwo can fill in there. Again, these are assumptions based on move strength and Mewtwo’s stats, we will have to run a full analysis on this one, although you can already preview how well it does against certain bosses by looking through Pokebattler.
Mewtwo Raid Oddities?
Raids, despite some early glitching, have kept there 15/90 egg to raid time split, however there are some mysterious things afoot trainers. A few oddities appeared in the mix: There appears to be no shiny Mewtwo, its BCR (Base Catch Rate) is down to the usual 2% for legendaries, it gives 5 candies upon catching instead of 3 (Video proof from u/derxfred here), and it has a different Raid CP: 60,540, instead of the usual 49,430. Doing the math that you can find in our wiki article on Raid Boss CP, and backtracking assuming a unknown Stamina value, you find that there is a higher stamina value than even a tier 5, 18750 to be exact in comparison to the usual 12,500. In the short term, this just means a harder Mewtwo raid, it will take longer and require more people, a trio now is about as hard as a duo used to be, which was close to impossible before friends. In the long term, this shows that there is a way for Niantic to output a raid that is harder than any we had faced prior.
New Boxes
Niantic has decided new sales were in order, so without further ado, here they are:
| Box Sales | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Special | x3 Egg Incubator | x2 Lucky Egg | x2 Premium Raid Pass | x2 Star Piece |
| Great | x5 Super Incubator | x2 Incense | x5 Premium Raid Pass | x4 Lure Module |
| Ultra | x10 Super Incubator | x6 Lucky Egg | x14 Premium Raid Pass | x6 Star Piece |
Our take on this is coming with the usual analysis but spoiler alert, the Ultra Box is pretty decent!
EX Raid Eligibility Live!
A few hours after Mewtwo entered the scene, the latest updates were forced and shortly thereafter, a tag is now visible in the top right of gyms to show if it is a EX Raid Gym or not. No longer will you need to determine by cells and Open Street Map designations whether a gym is eligible or not, and make attempts to trigger it! The game will tell you directly now, and it will look like this (Credit to u/robmark12 and u/pingz27):
