The Darkrai Dilemma (Don't Feed Him, Seriously)

Never before have I seen a pokemon added to this game with such a divisive impact as Darkrai.  There seem to be two camps when it comes to this.  Some people seem to think that Darkrai is a hardcore biscuit sink that is just designed to eat all our biscuits and get us to spend more money on the game, likening it to a move that would be made by every other mobile game dev that preys on their player base with addictive gambling-based mechanics.  Others think that people who have this viewpoint are “too impatient” and don’t respect how long this game is, saying that the slow nature of getting a good Darkrai is alright; that if you are just patient with it, then it will eventually be good.  While I will admit that I, personally, have beliefs that lean more towards the first camp than the second, I do think that there is good discussion to be had about the implementation of Darkrai, and I think that both sides of the debate are misunderstanding the “problem.”

Whether Darkrai is worth the investment is a different story, however, and the point of this post is to say that whether you think that no matter which side of this debate you are on, something that many players are ignoring is that Darkrai is not worth a single biscuit.  He costs way too much before getting going to ever be worth it from a min-max perspective.  If you like the mon and want to hunt him until he is perfect because you want to do so for the sake of using one of your favorites, then do what you find fun.  This post is to warn you that if you attempt to perfect your Darkrai though, as many of you are, you may find yourself burnt out on the game much faster than if you dedicate those resources to more affordable options.

Before I get into the bulk of this write up, I do want to disclose that I love this game, and any criticism that I have for the devs or for the community comes out of a place of love and wanting to see it be better, not from a place of hatred.  I put far more time and effort into minmaxing it than most people on here, have made multiple posts in this subreddit that have taken hours to write up, on top of the hours of YouTube content I have created.  I pay for the premium pass and an occasional diamond purchase, and for RaenonX premium as well because I want to financially support the devs and the community, not for just the in-game benefits and to access premium features.  I have no intention of ending my backing for this game.

Why Darkrai is Different

In order to understand why the expense of Darkrai is a problem for many players, I think it is important to understand how it is different from the other legends, who hardly anyone has complained about.  Darkrai is a mythical that was released as the finale of what was arguably the game’s biggest event yet.  The mysterious subskills being blank left many to speculate what may be to come, with many people thinking that we were going to get another even bigger 2-week-style event just to focus on “building a Darkrai”.  What was given to us was a much smaller recurring event where we might be able to encounter him every now and then to touch up a single subskill.  While this isn’t a problem (I actually think making it a much smaller recurring event is a cooler way to handle it), it definitely soured some people’s thoughts toward it.  The other legends all got huge 2 week long events where the first one we caught had fixed subskills, and every catch after that is a full set of random subskills, nature, and ingredients.

In practice, with how expensive the legends are, I would never advise a “hunt” for a legendary (similarly to how I would almost never suggest a “hunt” for even a 16 pip pokemon).  Outside of their events, they are so incredibly rare, that you practically have to spend a master biscuit on them to catch them in a reasonable amount of time.  Once you catch them, the first one has fixed stats.  This first one is clearly designed in a way to be a “good things come to those who wait” sort of deal.  Its stats are what I would describe as “usable at 100, with full investment”.  In other words, it has potential if you are willing to take it all the way to 100 and use a bunch of subskill seeds, that way you can’t get truly screwed by bad RNG out of a good one, because if you really want a good one because it is your favorite mon, you will be running it all the time, slowly building up that sleep XP and you will get it to level 100 and make the invest.  This is not a “good” or “optimal” play, as the cost is certainly drastically higher than the benefits, but if you like the mon and just want to use it because it is your favorite, the option is there for those that are dedicated enough.

If you do want an actually “good” one earlier on that is worth investment now, the devs have provided f2p-friendly method for doing so, if you play at the right time: events.  The events that the legendaries were released in made it much, much easier to catch them for a one-time currency that would lose all value after the week is over that, for the most part, was super accessible to f2p and premium players alike (even if whales had easier ways to gather the event currency).  This leads to, overall, everybody getting a few shots at random rolls on the legends for what is effectively 0 expense to all your other resources in the game.  Now, this is not a promise of a good legend (I have seen plenty of people who didn’t get lucky with the legendary stats), but it effectively makes a “good” one event-locked.  I wouldn’t even call them pay to win outside of events because they are so incredibly rare that even whales will struggle to catch them due to their rarity.  Now, there is a discussion to be had about whether event-locking should be a thing, but it isn’t a matter of draining our resources or being pay to win.

Part of why Darkrai is problematic is because he has no “safety net” fixed stats--no guarantee that you will ever have a good one no matter how much you work to improve him.  You could catch a thousand darkrai, and there is never a promise to you that you will ever see the likes of STS, STM, HSS, HSM, HB, or BFS.  The only thing that you are promised is that his levels will go up, which without great subskills to unlock like there are on the other legends, doesn’t make him ever worth it over any other investment.  The other big problem is a lack of a fun event to get a decent roll with no non-event-currency expense.  So many people feel that this act is wrong because for even a shot at a good Darkrai, you have to make an investment, whereas with the other legends, we were at least given a limited time event where we got to gamble for free.

The Biscuit Cost of Darkrai

Darkrai does give an inherent benefit to the whales over those not spending a ton on the game.  I would even go so far to say that Darkrai’s mechanics are absurdly expensive for a premium player who refuses to spend any real life dollars on diamonds.  I’ve seen the argument made that “Darkrai isn’t intended to be a good Pokemon now.  This game is a slow burn.  Just give him a daily biscuit when he is there and after enough encounters, you’ll have enough seeds.”  This is nice, in theory, but very impractical if you think just how horrendously long that would actually take without any additional biscuit investment.  

If you have the premium pass and give him just your daily biscuit every time you see him, then if we divide 25/4, then we get that it would take, on average, 6.25 encounters to catch him (or more realistically, 7 since there is no fraction of an encounter).  Now, if we account for the chance of a big hit, then the average biscuit really isn’t 4 pips, it is more like 4.8 pips, so realistically, now we are looking at 5.2, or 6 encounters for one catch.  Given that Darkrai can be hungry or the rare mega hit can occur, I’ll just round my estimate down even further to make a generous assumption that with this method, it would take just 4 encounters to catch darkrai off your daily biscuit alone if you are premium.  

If you assume a generous 2 Darkrai encounters per month, then that equates to 2 months per Eureka seed, meaning that you wouldn’t complete your first full completely random roll of all of Darkrai’s subskills and previously unlocked ingredients for the first full year of time spent after the New Moon Event became a thing.  This is more time than I think any of us are willing to make on many of our investments and that is just for the first reroll of all of his skills, not even trying to get the best skills possible.  Given that it would take this long, and that he appears during an event where mons are less likely to get all full, it is obvious that the intent behind this event is just to get us to spend biscuits on Darkrai, which unless you are the most conservative person in the world with your biscuits or you play the game super casually, the only people that are going to have that kind of biscuit budget are the whales.  

Not to mention, even if just using your daily biscuit was a feasible tactic for improving your Darkrai, most of the time, there still was likely something else on the field that you could have given it to.  I know that many people have encountered Darkrai surrounded by a bunch of ratattas.  If you are getting that many ratatta spawns, the odds are that one of them is hungry is pretty high; if none of them are, there is still a chance that it could big hit without it being hungry, and if all that doesn’t work, one extra pokebiscuit really isn’t that big of an expense.  Now, Raticate isn’t an amazing pokemon, but in that time, if we assume that you could otherwise be catching one rattata every time you encountered a Darkrai instead of feeding Darkrai that one biscuit, you could have caught 24 rattata.  

If you are catching that many rattata, you probably are a rat fanatic that has the silver badge.  The odds of getting a rattata with BFS+HB (a dream combo that makes any berry mon great immediately no matter their species or nature) in the first 2 slots alone after you have gotten that badge is 1/21.  Catching 24 rattatas gives you a nearly 69% (nice) chance of getting at least one rat with BFS+HB in the first 2 slots.  Given that there are the level 50, and if you are willing to wait a long time for the combo to come online, the level 75 and 100 slots as well giving you additional rolls for the combo, the odds get even better that you can get yourself this combo on a rattata if you just took your biscuits that would have gone towards Darkrai and dedicate them to a rather mid mon instead.  Sure, raticate is mid in this game, but I cannot understate just how good BFS+HB is.  I would use a BFS+HB raticate on snowdrop over a BFS+HSM walrein of equal level any day.  The combo is just that good.

The XP Cost of Darkrai

Not enough people are talking about how insanely expensive leveling Darkrai is.  Being a mythical Pokemon, it has the highest XP in the entire game, being more than double the cost to raise than any non-pseudo, non-legendary mon (let that sink in; with the same amount of candies, you could raise up 2 raichus to max level before you could raise your one Darkrai to max, and that doesn’t even account for the fact that you can get double the sleep XP on the raichus since there are 2 of them, that is just for candy cost).  Its candies are also tremendously rare, meaning that a large portion of the candy expense is likely to be made through using up your handy candies which, once again, is a more accessible resource if you are willing to spend money on the game.

Now, Darkrai does have something going for it in that it does spawn significantly more than other legendaries, so maybe its higher XP curve negated by the more frequent spawns with the New Moon Event and capability to spawn everywhere will counteract the higher XP cost.  To put this theory to the test, lets do some calculations.  According to RaenonX’s XP Table function, to raise a Darkrai from level 25 to 65, it takes 5078 candies’ worth of XP.  Another legendary, like Cresselia, would take 4155 candies’ worth of XP to clear the same levels, a 923 candy difference.  Let’s try to make another high ball estimate for how many Darkrai candies you might pull in from any give New Moon.  If we were to assume that every night Darkrai is visible, you have 10 friends that send out Darkrai candy for each of the 3 days of the New Moon, and 5 of those candy collections double up, that means each New Moon, you would get 45 Darkrai candies from friends.  If you, personally, encounter Darkrai twice throughout the New Moon Event and both times it is the 3 star sleep, you would get an additional 40 candies, meaning you get a total of 85 Darkrai candies per month.  

At this rate, you could assume that one could expect to see about 1020 gained in the course of one year; so if your goal were raising your level 25 mon to level 65 in one full year (something very doable if you are dedicated enough and are trying to genuinely use it), you would be putting in only 97 less candies into a Darkrai than a Cresselia.  This would be alright if it were the only cost; if there were desirable skills to be acquired at those breakpoints that are worth the extra effort and investment, but as it stands, this isn’t the only battle we are facing when it comes to raising a Darkrai.  We need to spend biscuits on getting the subskills to begin with and on the XP to raise it.

The Opportunity Cost of Darkrai

There are 2 things to consider when it comes to opportunity cost and Darkrai, the first of which is that his skill drains energy.  This can be counteracted in one of 3 ways, all of which have their problems.  

The first and most viable option is to use a more powerful healer or multiple healers.  This requires more resources and a potential split investment of your seeds on healers, and doesn’t even fully counteract it because it leaves you at the mercy of RNG.  If you have a bad or even just mediocre healing day, and Darkrai decides to go insane, you will be left with a solid amount of raw snorlax strength, but not without the team looking worse for wear, significantly cutting back your team’s productivity.  People already complain about the loss in productivity just dipping below 80% energy, but this is nowhere near the loss in energy from bottoming out (which with an alright healer, you would never do, even on normal “bad healing days”, but this may happen every now and then with darkrai due to the added energy cost).  Dropping from 80% to 79% energy loses the team about 13.5% productivity.  Dropping from 2% to 1% loses the team a massive 34% productivity (from the already abysmally slow rates you were getting at 2%).  The difference is so extreme that there is a bigger drop in productivity percentage from 2% to 1% energy than there is from 150% to 2% (2% is about 68.2% as productive as 150% and 1% is 66% the productivity of 2%).  You could manage your team very intensely by rotating Darkrai out as the energy gets low, but if he gets off a double proc at the wrong time and your healer(s) decide to go on strike, 24 energy lost is still a very significant impact, immediately taking you down past an energy breakpoint if you weren’t previously above 100%.  You could use pillows on the bad energy days, but that plays even further into the “not f2p friendly” accusations that Darkrai is fighting.

A 2nd option is to take advantage of dark types’ immunity to Darkrai’s bad dreams.  I think that this is the most ineffective method of dealing with it, since it gives you very few options for team members to make a strong team to begin with, and your only healing option would be umbreon who, if we are being generous to it, is a subpar healer at best, so you really aren’t solving the energy problem since it would still remove a healer from the equation and regular energy depletion is still a thing.  If there ever becomes a dark-type E4E mon (or maybe even energizing cheer mon), this may become a more reasonable option, but as it stands, building a dark type team around him is practically useless.

The third option would be to just… not care and tank the hit on energy.  It sounds really dumb, but if you design your teams around ingredient mons, you can still make a lot of the strongest meals even with lowered ingredient productivity if you have decent ingredient mons even while operating at the lowest energy levels.  Berry mons are really the ones that need energy since they are the only ones that rely on their main form of productivity throughout the night, when energy gets the lowest since it is the longest period of time without checking the app.  Ingredient and skills mons don’t care nearly as much about energy since they enter sneaky snacking after a while, where their main form of productivity becomes 0 anyway.  By being willing to just run the bare minimum for ingredient mons to still reliably make the top meals even with low energy, you can still net lots of strength.  This is probably the easiest, cheapest, and most reliable strategy to pull off of the three, but also is effectively hard capped in strength by the strength of the meal that you are building the team around, thus, leading to teams that will be good, but never great.

The second opportunity cost to consider is that it takes up your special team member slot.  While using it on an “all” specialist seems like the best use case for the special slot, if you manage to land a (or multiple) legend(s) that has really good stats, then it really is a genuine consideration sometimes which mon can take up the special slot.  As time goes on and we all maybe eventually get at least one good legend other than the mythical(s), then this cost will become significantly more drastic, especially since the other legends (as of right now) have no drawback to play around; only buffs that come from their respective types.

The Illusion of a “Cheap Darkrai”

I’ve seen the occasional mindset of “Darkrai is expensive, yea, but if he is hungry, I’ll toss him a biscuit in case he mega hits”.  While this mindset leads to less overall waste of biscuits, it still is a waste in my eyes.  If we go on the same assumptions as earlier about time spent for him to be caught this way, even if every single darkrai we encounter is hungry, then only 1 in 10 will actually mega hit.  There are better odds that you would end up taking the Darkrai home from 9 biscuits on it being hungry, tripling the biscuit’s value every time, than the odds that any one of those biscuits mega hits.  Granted, you are still only spending 9 biscuits on a Eureka seed, but how long did it take you to get that one seed this way?  Even if you see 1 hungry Darkrai per month, that is still 9 months for a single seed.  Even if you get 1 lucky seed off a mega hit, that trend isn’t likely to continue, and those biscuits will have been a waste.  One seed effectively holds no value, since in order to be better than other options, Darkrai needs a minimum of around 4 and that is if you get lucky on the stat rolls.

Is Darkrai Even Good Once he Gets Good Stats?

Darkrai’s claim to fame is being the game’s first “all” specialist.  This sounds super powerful on paper, but do his stats actually reflect that?  Let’s first analyze him by looking at him from the perspective of each specialty individually, then see how that all works in tandem.

Ingredients

One thing that many have already pointed out is that Darkrai is a terrible ingredient specialist.  Like, I mean, terrible if you evaluate him as such.  The problem is that they made his “A” ingredient be apples.  For those of you that do not know, they make an ingredient specialist have an ingredient list of 2, 5, 7 for whatever their A ingredient is, then for all other ingredients, they take whatever the strength is for the A ingredient at that level and divide by that ingredient’s strength, then round to figure out what the ingredient count should be for the other ingredients (in case you were wondering, this is true for berry and skills mons too, but their “A” list is 1, 2, 4 instead of 2, 5, 7).  Because they gave the 2, 5, 7 split to apples, the weakest ingredient which has only 90 base value, that made it so that even though his rate of ingredient finding and frequency is alright, he still is significantly worse than just about every other ingredient finder in the game.  Darkrai’s ingredient finding rate is 19.2% and the base period between helps is 2900 seconds.  To compare, Skeledirge is the only other ingredient mon in the game with apples as the A ingredient, and his base ingredient rate is 26.8% (1.396x Darkrai’s rate) and his base period between helps is 2700 seconds (1.074x faster).  This leads to Skeledirge being 49.9% better at making apples than Darkrai.

One thing that I think is often overlooked with Darkrai when it comes to ingredient finding is that Darkrai has a bit of a unique ability that every other ingredient specialist in the game does not have.  One of the reasons that many insist upon mono builds being the only viable option for ingredient specialists is because they are power creep proof.  If you level up a mixed ingredient mon around the idea of it being able to provide valuable multi-ingredient coverage on a single dish that is currently the strongest in the game, then that kind of sucks when it inevitably gets power crept by new meals.  Darkrai has the unique ability to change its list, though, so having him as a dedicated mixed list farmer could be more viable.  Given that this would require one to get lucky with Eureka seeds on both ingredient rolls AND subskill rolls, however, I would not advise this approach to anyone, other than for the sake of providing supplemental ingredients alongside its primary focus of skills if you have plenty of eureka seeds to spare (somehow).

Skills

Seriously, if you want to run Darkrai for the skill alone, just run Ampharos.  It gets 2 evolution levels that Darkrai doesn’t get saving you seeds, doesn’t have as many inventory problems by spreading itself thin trying to do everything else (its base inventory is nearly half that of Darkrai’s, but with its 2 evolutions, it becomes only 3 less and it pulls in 1 less berry per berry proc and less ingredients per ingredient proc as well, giving it a larger effective inventory), its skill actually goes up to level 7 instead of capping out at 6, it doesn’t take your special team slot, and most importantly of all, its skill doesn’t have the massive drawback of draining the team’s energy every time it procs.  

Ampharos procs a significant amount more than Darkrai, having more than double the trigger rate and a faster base speed.  The only thing that Darkrai has going for it is that its skill has 3x the value when comparing at the same skill level.  This does lead to an overall skill strength output from Darkrai being more than that of an Ampharos if their skills are the same level, but take that Ampharos’s main skill to level 7 and you will find that it does better than the Darkrai for skill strength production with ease.  Unless they ever give Bad Dreams a main skill level 7, I cannot imagine a world where anyone would ever consider using Darkrai for the skill alone over an ampharos.

Berries

When it comes to evaluating a berry specialist, there are 3 ways to go about it.  The first is by evaluating their performance under sneaky snacking, the 2nd is by evaluating their berry productivity while not sneaky snacking, and the third is to try evaluating their composite total strength when taking the combined raw value of their berries, ingredients, and main skill with favored berry.  

The first method is not the best way to evaluate Darkrai, since you would never consider him as a sneaky snacking candidate since a lot of his value comes from being an all specialist.  Sneaky snacking him would literally just make him a worse sneaky snacked weavile, something that is DEFINITELY not worth the investment.  Because of this, something that other berry specialists have going for them is that they have the ability to go into a sneaky snacking “mode” every now and then, where Darkrai doesn’t really have that option and it still be a potentially optimal play.  

The third method, in my mind, is the best method to get the full picture, but is very difficult to actually do given that some skills are very difficult to analyze on an individual level, such as Extra Helpful S on A-Ninetales (which RaenonX likes a little too much when doing a production comparison) and Tasty Chance S on Weavile (which is easily the skill that is done the most dirty when doing production comparison evaluation for total strength).  Given that these 2 mons are the ones that are the best to compare Darkrai to, being the strongest at their shared island, and the fact that I will be doing a bit more analysis of the composite strength later, the second method for evaluating berry mons is the best route to go with here.

So, how does Darkrai actually measure up?  Well, Weavile helps 7.4% faster, but Darkrai finds berries over ingredients 7.9% more of the time.  This results in Darkrai being ever so slightly better than Weavile for raw berry strength.  Given that this comparison is so ridiculously close, I would say that evaluating it as any one specialty in particular, its true role is to be a berry finder (especially with how difficult weavile is to hunt), since it is the only job where it comes out practically equal to non legend options.

Combining the Specialties

So, clearly Darkrai is more of a berry specialist than anything else, but it is unique by at least being better than a typical berry mon for skills and ingredients… or… is it?  Well, the answer is yes, but the difference may not be as extreme as you might think.

There happens to be a mon in this game that many people overlook for its generalist capability because nobody really considers berry mons for main skill seeds, but if you open up your mind to it, then it shares a striking resemblance to a diet Darkrai.  That mon is Houndoom.  

Houndoom had its main skill reworked some time ago to be Charge Strength M instead of Charge Strength S to give it a bit of a buff.  This makes it a dark type berry specialist that has herbs for an option in its ingredient list and a pretty strong charge strength main skill that procs somewhat infrequently.  Given that Darkrai is a dark type with herbs as an option for ingredients that effectively is a glorified berry specialist, this makes Houndoom the perfect benchmark for comparing to Darkrai for overall productivity in all metrics, since realistically, the cost for raising and running a Darkrai is basically only going to give you the added value of running it over a Houndoom.

So, what are the comparisons?  For berries, Houndoom helps at 87.9% of Darkrai’s speed and finds berries at a rate 98.6% as effective as Darkrai, leading to Darkrai producing 15.4% more berries than Houndoom.  When it comes to ingredients, Darkrai’s herb ingredient list will, on average, find 3.33 herbs per ingredient proc versus Houndoom’s 2.33, a 42.9% increase.  Darkrai helps 13.8% faster, but finds ingredients 5.4% less often.  This all composites to Darkrai being 53.8% better at finding herbs.  For skills, a level 6 Bad Dreams is 112.8% stronger than a single level 7 CSM, but Houndoom has a proc rate that is 73.9% better than Darkrai’s.  After also accounting for Darkrai’s 13.8% faster frequency, Darkrai produces 39.2% more skill strength than a Houndoom.

So there are our metrics.  In exchange for all the extra biscuits, for over double the dream shards and candies, for your team’s energy, and for the special slot on your team, you can have what is effectively a Houndoom that produces 15.4% more berries, 42.9% more ingredients, and 39.2% more skill strength.  Additionally, as it stands Houndoom has the ability to have a speed up nature (lets assume Brave), while Darkrai is fixed to a neutral nature, closing the gap between them further.  If the Houndoom has that nature, then Darkrai is only about 3.9% better for berries, 28.6% better for ingredients, and 25.3% better for skills.

Given that this is the comparison, I would raise this question, would all of this work, resources, and time be considered well spent if Darkrai weren’t a “mythical Pokemon”, but instead was displayed as a really buff Houndoom?  How many of you would actually consider investing in such a Houndoom?

Why it isn’t as bad as Gacha

While I agree that the Darkrai implementation is kind of a greedy move intentionally designed to get players to spend more, I do not believe that this puts them on par with the scummy moves that is synonymous with many other mobile game devs and gacha.  The big problem with gacha in games is that it is addictive.  In a game where you can unlock unlimited loot crates to potentially get that one item to make your experience easier, one can drop hundreds of dollars all at once and become addicted to that quick dopamine hit of opening that crate.  Darkrai can, at a maximum, be caught 3 times a month and that is if you already get lucky.  Nobody can break their bank on Darkrai alone.  While it certainly is designed with f2p-unfriendly principles, I don’t believe that this can put these devs on the same tier as other scummy mobile game devs that prey on their playerbase.  It certainly brings my perspective of them down a few pegs, but I still see them as better.

Tl;Dr: Darkrai is cool, but is REALLY not worth the costs.  Don’t bother feeding him a single biscuit, even if he is hungry.  It may seem fun to try after this mythical Pokemon, but he will draw away so many of your biscuits that it may contribute to the overall feeling of burnout that many players are experiencing as you don't have the biscuits to catch anything else good.  I strongly advise that even fans of the mon don’t bother using him or trying to make him good with eureka seeds, and just keep him as an incomplete trophy in the box (unless you are super casual and don't care about strength, which is an acceptable way to play).