Excellent, excellent, excellent, excellent, excellent, excellent...
Answers
I raid/spin with my wife’s account the times when she stays home with our son and I drive to try to organize a raid...hers is level 34—caught a 2083; 2078; and a 2077 the top three cps...meanwhile I have caught a boosted 13/15/13; and a 2059...the others I have are in the VERY low 2000s. Kinda works out because I didn’t bother getting her 2 level 30 Dragonites to be even 80%+. My Dragonites are 96s and 93s.
I feel your pain. I have now lost two with 2076 CP after landing excellent curve balls on each and every throw. I'm still rather miffed over it.
I have my gold Dragon and Flying badges, used golden raspberries every time, and landed excellent curves. There was literally nothing else I could have done better to catch it.
RNG is cruel and unforgiving at times, even if you do everything right. I was raiding with some friends earlier today and at one raid, my buddy got 13 balls. GR and excellent curves on all 13 (he even has his gold flying and dragon badges). Raidquaza broke free each time and ran.
Keep at it though, and you'll snag a good one!
I get it that 99.9% of this game is strictly RNG, but that needs to change.
It's really hard to keep my motivation when I can do absolutely nothing to control my successes. At both of the raids where the 2076 ran, there were others in the same group who lobbed straight balls and caught it within the first 3 balls. Niantic really needs to change their catch rate mechanics so that each successive Excellent curve increases the catch chances dramatically. If someone can do, say, five in a row, the fifth should be a guaranteed catch.
The word out is that excellent hits don't seem to produce catches at the rate they should. I've never caught a legendary with an excellent throw, it's mostly great and nice with a few normals thrown in to muddy the waters.
Pondering doing an actual study to see what the catch rate per throw type is. Would require logging every cap, which would require a second person or putting down the phone to record throws which would disrupt rhythms and reduce the real catch rate. It's possible there's a bug or strange quirk in the code that makes excellent hits less likely to catch than the stated percents. Or it's possible that I'm just looking at the law of small numbers (I've caught 41 legendaries so far - wasn't hooked up with a raid group for the birds or Raikou, got all of the rest in some numbers, and two Mewtwo.)
My strategy when hitting legendaries is to just pile up the great hits and hope I get it. Went 9/10 on Ho-Oh and 7/9 on Groudon. Not so great on the others, but still 15/35 on Kyogre, doing lots of raids. 3/10 on Rayquaza so far, including a weather buffed 93% (CP 2584).