I have a 3 star shadow skarmory.
Would it be worth it to purify him for a perfect skarmory?
Does it have battle league plans, and if so, does it have a high % rating for one of the leagues? If so, maybe leave it alone. But if it doesn’t have good league potential and you’ll just transfer it, anyway, then just purify it when you get a research task to “Purify n Shadow Pokémon”.
Skarmory is in the top 5 for great league and it is gonna be used for that.
Ivs are 10/14/14.
I have a normal skarmory too that’s 12/15/10
I think it sounds like it’s better for league than your ordinary Skarmony. I’d probably keep it the way it is.
But my intuition for league play is pretty undeveloped, since I avoid that part of the game as much as I can. My primary advice is to consider somebody else’s opinion before mine for this question. Let us know what you choose and how that works out, though.
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I kinda figured I should keep it as shadow.
Hard to get a 3 star shadow skarmory.
I am not a 100% sure as I am not a GBL enthuasiast about this so don’t take my answer for a fact but I believe Skarmory is mainly used for GBL as a defender rather than an offender. As a shadow it is a better attacker but less bulky compared to a Purified Skarmory so ultimately keeping it as a Shadow Pokémon is from what I managed to understand not worth all that much.
That said, Purifying a 10/14/14 will become a 12/15/15 so it won’t be a perfect one when Purified either.
Edit: found this old Reddit thread and they do indeed say that Shadow Skarmory performs worse than a regular one.
Another comment I found:
I think it’s best to think less “on paper” and more strategically. I.e., what are you using skarmory for? Skarm is pretty tanky in general, and massively tanky against the right things. It’s also slow. It also strategizes around BB, which is enough of a nuke in and of itself with the normal version to where the pros of output from the shadow version kind of become moot if that makes sense.
If my team is whiscash, annihilape, skarmory - i’m planning on using the skarmory as a safe swap into a grass lead, or a safe swap into a grass swap into my whiscash. Still having to use shields against a frenzy plant kind of defeats the point of why skarmory is there in the first place. You might as well have used a different flying type that gets to moves faster if you were looking for a replacement for regular skarmory there.
I did see a few comments saying Shadow Skarmory is still decent in Great League but from what I’m gathering it’s indeed not necessary to keep as Shadow for that one league specifically. I’d say do with it what you want.
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Yes, @Jormdeworm is quite right. Shadow Skarmory is viable, but not nearly as good as the non-shadow version. This season, PvPoke ranks Skarmory as 5th for Great League, whereas it ranks shadow Skarmory as 44th.
So maybe purify, but you could also just want to keep it as a shadow and keep looking for a better Skarmory for Great League.
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Thanks for clarifying. Better having accurate info than theoretical, any day!
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