Picture this: Your team is well in the lead with just two minutes left on the clock. All of your opponents' goals have already been closed and there’s no possible way they could catch up now. Because your team is skilled and organized, you head to the middle as a group to take down the Zapdos and lock in your win. Just as the Zapdos is about to die, an enemy Venusaur snipes it with a hyper beam from a mile away, giving the other team the kill. The rest of Venusaur’s team, w﷽ho ignored the Zapdos, are already on their way to close out your goals. Each dunk earns them 100 points, and withi⭕n seconds they’re suddenly in the lead.
If you’ve played a few games of , you’ve undoubtedly been in this exact scenario. Zapdos is a powerful comeback mechanic that has the power to completely turn the tide of a match, even if one team is woefully behind. More often than not, the team that secures the Zapdos kill will end up winning the game, reg🤪ardless of who’s in the lead or by how much. Zapdos is Pokemon Unite’s Golden Snitch and it makes the rest of the match essentially meaningless. It would be one thing if it took a coordinated effort from an entire team to seize the opportunity, but as my example illustrates, there are plenty of ways to rob an entire team of a Zapdos kill with one well-timed attack.
This is the heart of the problem with Zapdos. It doesn’t take profound skill or expert coordination to defeat it; all you have to do is get the last hit in. Whether you’re sniping with Venusaur or jumping in at the last second as a speedster with movement abilities, it’s incredibly easy to sneak in that last hit and win the game for your team. It’s especially true if the other team is skilled and working together, because stealing the Zapdos rewards bad teamwork. The mercenaries on your team are more likely to be out in the lanes doing their own thing when Zapdos goes down, so it's much easier for them to get to the goals and score massive points while the other team scrambles back to the lane to try to defend.
It’s the only really lousy thing about the game because it feels extraordinarily unfair. There’s really no counterplay to it either. A lot of players are recommending that you ignore the Zapdos if you’re in the lead already, but I think there’s a couple of problems with that. There’s no scoreboard in the game, so unless it's a blowout already you might not know which team is in the lead. Secondly, this gives the other team all the space they need to take the Zapdos themselves. You can head up and try to steal the kill from them if you’ve got the right character, but I have a fundamental problem with Pokemon Unite encouraging this type of play. MOBAs are at their best when they reward teamwork and coordination, but Zapdos rewards the opposite.
I’m not going to complain without proposing a solution of course. My plan is simple: once Zapdos dies, the team that is standing inside its ring is granted to kill. The kill will not be confirmed until only one 🎀team is inside the ring𓄧. This would completely eliminate snipers like Venusaur from attacking outside of the ring, and it would make it very difficult for a speedster like Zeraora to dash in and get the last hit because the other team would just kill them right after and earn the Zapdos boost. You could conceivably still dash in with a Speedster then use a Defender like Snorlax to push the other team out, but now you’re using teamwork to take the point, which is exactly what we want to see.
Zapdos is the biggest problem in the game. How the developers choose to address it will tell us a lot 🎐about the kind of support Pokemon Unite is going to get moving ꦫforward. I hope some kind of change can be made soon because I’m getting pretty tired of losing games unfairly.