Whether or not shadow Pokemon are worth purifying can be a daunting quandary for both new and old Pokemon Go players. In spite of many players having questions about this, finding good information can be difficult. Let’s take a look at what we’ve uncovered on the topic.

When Are Shadow Pokemon Worth Purifying?

It’s actually pretty rare that shadow Pokemon are worth purifying provided that you’re mainly interested in doing damage in raid battles and other challenging content. The main limitation during raid battles is time and doing 20% extra damage is a pretty big deal.

Simulations show that shadow Pokemon are very consistently above their non-shadow peers in terms of total damage output over a set time. Often enough, taking 20% more damage means very little because raid boss charged moves can do considerably more than the remainder of your health, meaning that that extra damage merely becomes overkill.

That said, you can’t mega evolve shadow Pokemon and there are some cases where a shadow Pokemon has a powerful mega form, but even a shadow bonus won’t let its regular form do competitive damage. Beedrill is a decent example of this, even if Scizor arguably has a better mega evolution overall.

Conversely, though, Charizard has an excellent shadow form and a couple more attack IVs won’t really help its mega evolution, which has a monstrous amount of stats to begin with. In that case, it would be better to mega evolve a regular Charizard, even if it has lower stats, and keep the shadow version as another Pokemon in your team.

Some PVP-oriented Pokemon are another case for purification, particularly Sableye, which benefits enormously from access to return. These Pokemon are few and far between, though, since most Pokemon have much better coverage moves than return.

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So Should I Purify My Shadow Pokemon

The key idea here is that it’s generally best to not purify Shadow Pokemon unless you have a very specific purpose in mind for them. We hope you’ll find this information useful the next time you’re playing Pokemon Go! Have anything to add? Let us know in the comments!