Halloween event
Official in-game announcement out. In short:
Gen4 ghost/dark types out, like Drifloon and Stunky, as well as shiny Drifloon.
Limited time special research featuring Spiritomb.
Giratina in raid battles until Nov 20. Not clear which forme, but the picture before the announcement shows Altered Forme.
Double catch candy (not trades, transfers, or hatches, announcement only mentions catching).
Sounds interesting, about what I expected, save the special research, which is a nice surprise.
Answers
Special research was a pleasant surprise. Hopefully they do more of them for other themed events.
No bonus transfer candy is disappointing, yet not surprising. No trade bonus candy, shortened buddy distance, or bonus hatch candy is a bigger surprise considering all of those involve being out and playing the game.
No surprise about new shinies, just more that I won't get :(
No mention of the dark- and ghost- type evos is unfortunate. A large portion of non-legendary/mythical Gen 4 dark- and ghost- types are cross-gen evos. This tells me Niantic is either going to pad out Gen 4 as much as possible and/or they have no idea what to do with the plethora of special evos.
Giratina's lack of solid moves still stings and I had hoped they'd change it before release. I still plan to raid them, just not as hard as I previously wanted to.
All in all the extra ghost types will be fun and hopefully I can find at least ONE shiny to make up for missing all of them last year, but the event as a whole still leaves me wanting more. Maybe I had my hopes too high.
Small but non-zero chance that the stat rebalance makes them somewhat useful. Perhaps double dragon moves as a gym sweeper? Still not worth raiding dozens of them for just that. We'll see.
As a free player, I used almost all my free passes on Mewtwo, plus some bought with gym coins. For Giratina, I'll do some, but also raid other pokemon with my free passes, like Shinx, Alolan Marowak (don't have one yet, hope they stick around), and whatever else good comes up.
All of the Gen 4 Pokemon are introduced with their stats post-balance. Both of Giratina's formes broke the 4k barrier after the shuffle, hence why they both received the nerf. Before the nerf Giratina-A had a CP of ~4040 instead of the 3965 it was projected to have.
This is a pretty good case for why the nerf should be incremental depending on how far over the 4k barrier a Pokemon's CP goes. Giratina-A's CP got completely gutted after the nerf. A less harsh nerf might not have gimped it as hard, moves notwithstanding.
