In Search of Mesprit

Since we hit level 40 our Pokemon Go our play has largely been about raiding and catching new Pokemon for the Pokedex.  This week seemed like a good time for for raids as three Sinnoh Pokemon were up on the list, Azlef, Mesprit, and Uxie.

The three featured Pokemon

When the raids started on Tuesday afternoon, our regular group lit up my phone with texts when the first one of them was spotted.  We bagged Azlef pretty quickly.  What I didn’t realize until somebody mentioned it in the text stream was that each of the three were only available in specific regions.  According to Pokemon.com:

• Trainers in the Asia-Pacific region may encounter Uxie
• Trainers in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and India may encounter Mesprit
• Trainers in the Americas and Greenland may encounter Azelf

So we were only going to ever get Azlef locally.

As it so happened, one of the friends who had picked up my friend code when I posted it to Twitter happened to be in Japan and sent me an invite for an Uxie raid when I had Pokemon Go up on my phone in front of my face.  I jumped in and managed to catch Uxie, so I had two of the three.  (I’ve posted my friend code here before. It is 3216 2939 2424.)

Getting Mesprit though, expecting to catch a random invite at just the right moment seemed unlikely to happen twice in a week.  I have a few people on my friend’s list in Europe, but what are the odds of lucking out again?

One of the more intrepid members of our local raid team suggested using one of the raid servers on Discord.  That was what she was doing to try and get the two out of region catches.

So I looked up servers and found a likely suspect called Pokemon GO Raids.  You can click on that link to join the server if you have a Discord account.  I am playing under my usual handle, in this case WilhelmArcturus because the game doesn’t allow spaces.

Once I sorted through the instructions and rules, I got myself ready to try and get in on a Mesprit raid… which basically adds up to sitting in the “mesprit-only” channel and waiting for somebody to post a raid.  Then you have to be one of the first five to respond… you can only remote invite five friends… and get acknowledged.  Then the person who posted the raid shares their friend code, you send a friend invite, get accepted, then they go into the raid and invite the five people picked.

All of this means being quick to respond in the channel.  I made it into one raid, though I did not manage to catch Mesprit on the first try, so I have to go again.  It also means being in the channel at the right time of day.  Raids in Pokemon Go only seem to run from about 8am to 10pm locally, which is all EMEA times in this case, which means the mornings into the early afternoon my time are the likely points when I might get a raid.

So I am staring at the channel, waiting for somebody to announce a raid.