Looming in the Shadows: Sierra and Arlo down, Cliff to go

I've been making some more progress for the Looming in the Shadows special research quest line. Not as much as I was hoping to have made though. I'll get down to that in a moment after talking about the fight with Sierra.

As you know I already defeated Rocket GO Leader Cliff not too long before completing the 3rd step of the Looming in the Shadows quest. Where you have to defeat Rocket GO Leaders Cliff, Sierra and Arlo to complete that step. So it was truly unfortunate I had just beaten Rocket GO Leader Cliff prior to getting to that step. It resulted in me having to defeat 6 Rocket Grunt again to collect the Mysterious Component for crafting a new Radar.

Once I had a new radar, I was quite unfortunate. As there were a few days in a row where I couldn't spot any Rocket hideouts with the radar near me whenever I was playing. And since the hideouts seem to stay there the whole day, or many hours at least, there was not much point checking again later. When I did check later there were still no hideouts.

Recently when walking around with one of the people we take some gyms with, as we wanted to continue catching some Pokémon, we had the radar and found a nearby hideout. Finally! After several days with no hideout there was one again. So we decided to go walk there, check out which Leader it was and defeat them!

This time it was Sierra, the only Rocket GO Leader I had not beaten yet. So that got me excited! She really seems to have quite some sass as you can see in the thumbnail she said "I envy you-you get to battle me.". For the first battle I just took whatever it suggested me to use, so I could take a look at her Pokémon. I knew she'd likely have a Sneasel first, but the others could be different. The battle went fairly well, I did end up losing since the suggestions weren't good counters. Her sass showed again with a different message when I was ready to go into another battle, as she then said "You can't possibly match my skill, dear". After I defeated her in the next battle she then told me that she underestimated me and will not make the same mistake again. This can be seen in the following picture.

After defeating her I was able to catch a Shadow Sneasel. It was unfortunately not good IVs so I purified it and then transferred it.

Over the next few days I didn't get to do many Rocket Grunts. Sometimes a lot of Rocket Grunt stops will show up while playing, but other times there might not be a single one around us in the city center for the whole time we're playing. Today I was able to get the last components to make a new radar and someone in the team already showed me prior to us taking over those gyms that Arlo was nearby.

After taking over the gyms I decided to go beat Arlo again then. The first time I had to fight four times before I was able to defeat him, so I was curious what this battle was going to be. I heard that his second Pokémon was Magnezone, the first time I beat him he had Crobat as 2nd Pokémon. Here's a picture of some text he sometimes says prior to battling.

The Scyther took out my Metagross quite easily, only allowing it to do 1 charged attack and thus only breaking one of the two shields. This put me at a disadvantage as I had to another charged attack against the Magnezone then that wouldn't damage it as Arlo was just going to use that 2nd shield. I ended up losing the fight, as my Machamp just took too much damage and didn't deal enough damage back to the Scizor. My Ho-Oh also didn't end up being as useful because it can't have a Fire-type fast attack. Making some changes with the Pokémon I took with me I still ended up losing again the 2nd time when I was about to win, but he got his charged attack earlier than I did and we were both out of shields so I couldn't block it.

Third time's the charm. I took my Tyranitar with me again to deal with the Scyther and breaking one of the shields before taking Scyther out, then breaking the second shield while dealing a bit of damage to Magnezone. After Tyranitar fainted I switched over to Lucario who kept successfully raising its attack from using Power-Up Punch. The move itself doesn't do a lot of damage considering the health of the Rocket Leader's Pokémon, but that in attack combined with the fast attacks and occasionally charged attacks helped my Lucario take out the remaining health of Magnezone and completely defeat Scizor too. I did have to block a charged attack from Scizor. I also had Flareon with me as extra Fire-type attacker, but didn't end up needing it this time.

No screenshot of his screen when he was defeated as my charging cable is often causing issues with properly charging while walking around and battery was getting quite low. So I wanted to make sure to catch the Shadow Scyther.

Now I have to collect Mysterious Components again for a new radar and hopefully I can find Cliff then the next time I spot a Rocket hideout.

How is your quest progressing?