Are legendaries easier to catch the first week or days they are out?
Does their catch rate go down after a couple days or a week?
I am asking cus i was 12/15 mewtwo in the first week and then for the rest of mewtwo I was 21/40. Similar with creselia. Maybe I just started sucking the weeks after but wondering if this is a thing or all mental.
Answers
I will say that I don't necessarily believe all the RNG components of the game are truly random. For instance, I truly believe that item drop rates and raid reward drops are somewhat manipulated to give us less of what we are in short supply of. A while back, a commentor on this site claimed to have reverse-engineered the code and discovered the formula for pokestop drops, which showed that, for all items except regular pokeballs, the percentage likelihood of an item dropping was correlated with the percentage of that item in your bag.
I think the catch rate isn't carved in stone, but it's preset.
In this wave of Legendaries, it looks like the catch rate has been lowered. Before friendship, the base rate was 2.0%, and the practical values were that a Exc. GRB curve had a 16% catch rate, or about 1 in 6, while a Great GRB curve had a 14% catch rate, or about 1 in 7.
Currently, per game press, those rates have lowered. Base catch rate is 1.6%, an Exc. GRB curve has a 12.5% catch rate, or 1 in 8, and a Great GRB curve has a 10% catch rate, or 1 in 10.
My guess is that this rate was lowered as a result of all the friendship balls people are getting.
The catch rate table isn't the Pokemon's base catch rate value set in the game master, those are catch percentages after a bunch of math has been done accounting for any bonuses or lack of. The base catch rate value hasn't changed for Groudon, it's still 2%. The table is more the "per ball" chance of capture - with gold medal, GRB, and excellent curve throw each individual ball has a ~15% chance of catching it, that doesn't mean Groudon's base capture value is 15%. If you straight whip a ball at it with no berries, no medal, and land outside the circle the chance of that specific ball catching it is 1.6%.
If there was a change in the base catch rate value it would have been found in the game master file and there would be a hundred topics from people throwing a fit about it. Reddit would be in nuclear meltdown mode.
I hate using anecdotal evidence, but so far I've done 6 Groudon raids since its return and have caught all 5 non-shinies within the first 5 balls thrown. If the actual base catch rate value was lowered I sincerely doubt I'd have the same luck.
I've never noticed this. My legendary catch rate has held pretty steady since at least the Regis, definitely on the higher end of success. For reference, only one Mewtwo out of the entire month didn't stay caught and I have a perfect catch record for Cresselia (only did 3 of them though, maybe it's not the best representative). Maybe it's burnout causing your throws to go to crap toward the end?
