DRATINI AHOY!: Pokemon GO! Water-Pokemon Event

Dratini everywhere!

Greetings trainers,

Just an update letting folks know about Pokemon GO's recent Water-Pokemon event in celebration of the Global Water Festival. It seems like they've coded this event to alter the spawn data, making the majority of spawns equivalent to Water-biome spawns. What this means is that Pokemon that spawn in water biomes are now extremely common for the next week! The event runs from March 22nd to March 29th. Here is a list of water Pokemon trainers will want to get their hands on while the going is good:

Gyarados also got a model update,
not sure how I feel about the
colour scheme...

Strong battlers

• Dratini
• Magikarp
• Lapras
• Slowpoke
• Omanyte
• Totodile
• Shellder? (not actually sure this is water-biome associated, despite being a clam)

That's right! Dratini is Water-biome associated, and given that a friend reported catching 4 Dratini in 10 minutes (and I've already seen two today at work), it seems like this is confirmed. This is the week to stock up on Dratini candies and maybe get yourself a few good Dratini to evolve later! I don't think this will affect Dragonair or Dragonite spawns, as those fall into the "ultra rare" spawn category and aren't strictly biome-associated. The same goes for Vaporeon.

Rare finds (some redundancy)

Oh Blastoise... it's so sad how
bad you are now...

• Squirtle
• Totodile
• Lapras
• Mantine
• Omanyte
• Kabuto

If you still don't have a Mantine, now's your chance to get a great one! Not to mention plenty of Totodile candies. And as a personal recommendation: Kingdra is a really good prestige Pokemon, as it doubly resists fire and gets access to Hydro Pump. So if you want to stock up on Horsea candy, now is a good time.

Cheers,
Let's GO!

DPE vs. DPS and New Moves

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• An example of how DPE is useful
• Table of charge moves sorted by DPE
• Table of charge moves sorted by DPE/Cooldown
• Conclusion

Greetings Trainers!

Today's article is going to give a fresh perspective to the metagame. Trainers have previously been focused on moves based around things like damage-per-second (DPS). This made a lot of sense for both quick moves and charge moves, and DPS alone generally reflected a move's utility. Defending moves vs. attacking moves of course had unique DPS calculations, and move cool downs played an important role in how good a move was.

But in the new metagame, I think I'm prepared to say that DPS is not the most important factor in determining a move's utility. Quick moves especially have been largely balanced, and are more similar to each other than before; of course there are better and worse quick moves, but some of the higher-DPS quick moves have longer cool downs, while the slightly lower DPS quick moves allow you to dodge. Pick your poison, but unless you're dodging a lot (which some people do) they aren't all thaaaat different at the end of the day. Not to mention the Energy-per-second (EPS) rate of some of the quick moves is also more important now, and the weakest DPS moves tend to have higher EPS.

But today I'll go over a new concept that should help players understand how the new charge moves work in the current metagame. Damage-per-energy (DPE) is the ratio of base damage to energy consumed. So if you have a high DPE, that means you do lots of damage per charge bar.

DPE is your damage-per-energy consumed. 

If a move does 100 damage, and takes a full charge bar (100% energy = 1.0), then its DPE is: 100/1.0 = 100. 

If a move does 100 damage and takes half a charge bar (1/2 = 0.5), then its DPE is: 100/0.5 = 200. 

The higher the DPE, the more damage per energy consumed.