As the last day to catch Moltres winds down, many Pokemon GO players are still struggling to catch the Legendary fire-type. A new limited-time availability Legendary will show up late today or tomorrow, so players still have at least another week of level five battle raids to come. To take full advantage of the event, players need to make sure they are getting the most out of every raid.

There is obviously a lot of math going on behind the scenes in Pokemon GO to help determine the catch rate for each Legendary and some players have been analyzing that to figure out how to maximize the chance of catching. Connecting with a Premier Ball is only the first step towards making sure that you successfully catch a level five raid boss.

In order to have the best chance at catching a Legendary, players need to maximize the number of Premier Balls earned during the battle. Here are a few important factors to keep in mind, courtesy of The Silph Road Reddit community...

Gym Control

  • Spin the Gym stop before starting the raid. This should fix most of the bugs where you don't get the bonus.
  • If you're in a large city with many raids going on, try to pick out raids on gyms from your team.
  • For more rural players with fewer gyms, fight for control of the gyms nearby. Putting a strong defender (preferably Blissey) in a nearby gym and keeping the gym open for remote feeding goes a long way already.
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Personal Damage

  • Get the right counters. Many players think it doesn't matter what Pokemon you use because the group will win anyway. That might be true, but you do need good counters to get the damage count up.
  • Check for damage breakpoints on your Pokemon. Maybe you'll get a serious DPS boost from just one more power-up.
  • Raid in small groups of 3-6 players. If you go in with 20 players the battle will be over in a minute and you don't have enough time to deal a good amount of damage.
  • Survive. Rejoining resets your damage counter, so dodge enough specials to survive the battle with your first six. If you faint you can keep your damage by NOT rejoining, but please be reasonable and check with the others that they will make it without further help from you.
  • If you think you must rejoin, do so about a minute into the battle so that you'll still have lots of time to deal damage. In small enough groups, have everyone rejoin at the same time so that damage proportion will be roughly even and everyone gets +3 Premier Balls.

Team Contribution

  • Team contribution is calculated as the sum of your team's personal damage divided by the sum of everyone's personal damage. So everything from the previous section also helps here.
  • You'll get the maximum of +3 Premier Balls if at least ~half of the total damage is dealt by your team.
  • Split up big groups by team. Everyone will get the full bonus this way.

Some of these tips may seem like no-brainers to the level 40s out there, but don't forget that there are a lot of casual players participating in these events. Hopefully they can make it home with all the of the Legendaries, as well.

Good luck out there, trainers!

Pokemon GO is available now in select regions for Android and iOS devices.

Source: The Silph Road