Oh how times have changed...

I did a boosted Cresselia with Future Sight/Confusion 7am. 40, 38, 35...finished with 35 seconds to go. I had lot of difficulty with any Confusion a couple days ago. Turned out to be a 2041 catch. 21/21 catching, woulda been upset to miss this one. Not even near fainting, Mewtwo plus Tyranitars survived easily. Finding effective moves and resisting the boss’ moves make it much less complicated (no re-entry/trying to swipe B team battle parties)

So you yearn for simpler times? When there wasn't as much strategy to the game?

Pokemon Go has evolved at a glacier-like pace. Yet, with very few exceptions, it's evolved beautifully. What a truly fantastic game this has become. I'm very much looking forward to future changes.

And I don't miss having to wait weeks and weeks to find one more dratiini to finally evolve a Dragonite.

Good riddance to the early days.

People initially having trouble against Lugia with huge groups was more about counter availability than anything else, players just weren't prepared to take on the raid.

Of course the changes to the game have made the raids easier, much more so. But we've also gotten so much access to better counters and 1,5 years time to accumulate resources for powering them up.

The biggest factor was organization. An early GP article put it pretty succinctly that raids shifted the focus from generalists for gymming to specialists for raiding. When raids were first released few people had optimized counters ready to go, hence the need for lobbies of a dozen people. I remember using Gyarados against Lugia because it was my best "dark" attacker and I had only one each of Tyranitar and Golem.

A ton of changes have come since then. One of the firsts and arguably more important ones was the "lose all you damage bonus" bug was fixed, meaning people weren't afraid to re-lobby. Then more counters became available and still are becoming available. Then weather boosts came. Then exclusive moves making absolute units out of previously ignored Pokemon. Then friendship boosts. The most recent change to effectiveness multipliers makes raid bosses easier than ever. During all that time we've become more organized to the point where we can analyze raid difficulty the minute a Pokemon's stats and moves are added to the game master and even hypothesize without that.

I expect before too long raid bosses will be buffed in some manner to counterbalance all these benefits. Earlier today, data for stat boosting moves was found in the game. This could allow for a potential "boss aura" for lack of a better word to buff the stats of raid bosses similar to Totem Pokemon in the Gen 7 games. Or maybe not, Niantic could be setting up raids to be plowed through as fast as possible to rake in those sweet raid pass sales on raid days.