Are Legendaries worth it?
I'm not asking to be cynical. I'm still going to try my best to catch them all. However, based on the difficulty of catching them, and their limited availability hindering your ability to improve them, are they worth the trouble when you can level up an army of the best faster and at much less cost?
I'd really like to hear from those who have caught any, and how useful they are in raids and battles.
Answers
This doesn't really answer your question but in a month of raiding (T2-T4) I had gotten 13 TMs, in the past 4 days (only T5s) I've gotten 5 TMs.
That alone has made up for the fact that I'm 2/10 at catching the legendaries. I mean I have 7 ttars that I'm likely never going to improve, but I got lots of ttar candy, rare candy and TMs from those raids.
TL;DR: I place much more value on articuno over Lugia at this point in the game's life
Right now a popular ideology towards playing this game is to get the highest dps mons in specific match-ups for raids: articuno is going to tear up dragonite when dragonite becomes a raid boss, along with the upxoming dragon + ground/flying types in gen 3 & 4 (salamence, garchomp, flygon)
It's attack is somewhere in the low 190s-not the highest but with its bulk it will be useful. Lapras fills the role fairly well however. It has a slightly lower attack but it's water typing removes ice's weaknesses to fire and steel. I still place importance on articuno
Zapdos is also going to be clutch for a couple of generations-mildly bulky + a nice attack stat may replace jolteon as the cliche electric type in scenarios where legendaries are permitted. Charge beam is kind of slow but the energy yield is going to be nooiiice. I place importance on this one
Lugia is soOoOo tanky but its attack sits at 190. For raiding it's not the most efficient (alakazam has 270ish attack and espeon 261) but it probably helps a little bit as the last Pokémon in battles where timing out is not an issue. Because I want mons that deliver damage fast in raids, Lugia is not my priority
Moltres is a bulkier flareon with access to the same movepool (except flareon has ember). The advantage it has over flareon is its double resistance to bug and grass. Because it's so similar to flareon I don't place a lot of importance on this one either. Although Moltres's sprite is ?
It depends on how the game evolves. Lugia and articuno are tanks. That makes them ok, but kind of selfish to use, in raid battles where the number of people is more than sufficient to beat the boss. If I were facing a gym stacked with dragonites, pre-gen 2 this was not uncommon, articuno would have been a god send.
For me, the novelty of catching a "Legendary" has worn off as I've been blessed and fortunate to catch my fair share. In total, I've done about 55 Legendary raids (in both Singapore and Sydney). After catching 10 of each (I'm OCD about even numbers) I mainly just do the raids for TM's, Rare Candies & Golden's.
As for their practicality, I mainly use Articuno to Anchor my raid teams against Lugia and in my opinion, he does a fine job. As for Lugia, I use him to sweep Gyms and like Articuno, he does a fine job, too.
It seems that only Mewtwo and Raikou will have great use in gyms. Others may have some more use in raids (and since the game is now raid-centric, this must be put into consideration).
Another thing to consider is that whether it is worth the candies and stardust. For example, some legendaries are only marginally better than the best non-legendary attackers, so it all comes down to their levels. A level 30 legendary is not necessarily stronger than a level 40 non-legendary attacker.
The suggestion is, if you are to power a legendary, max it out. Otherwise, you shouldn't have powered it in the first place.
I had successfully soloed machamp once and wanted to try again. My old team wouldn't cut it so in heat of moment I spent rare candies and a lot of dust taking lugia to over 3000CP and dropped a charge tm on him to get sky attack. I then easily beat that machamp so I am now rather fond of my 86.7% lugia. I'm not going to spend anything on my 3 articuno however
