#tera raids

A new SV Tera Raid Battle event has been announced, running from from Jul17-Aug6! The opponent will be a 7⭐ Dragon-Tera Magikarp!

a quick little mew doodle to celebrate tomorrow

y'all ready to get your ass beat? cuz I sure am!!!! hahaha!!!!!!! 😇😇

So, I join a raid with an Okidogi, not realizing the Feraligatr has psychic fangs that's my B, and I get hit so hard by psychic fangs that my Okidogi gets turned into a fucking Koraidon.

I'm not joking.

My Okidogi got renamed to Koraidon and had Breaking Swipe and could use it...

I think Feraligatr hit me so hard it made me change Pokemon with my ally.

But it's kinda neat that Okidogi used an animation it shouldn't even have.

Also, you can see that my ally has my Okidogi under their name but there's only one Okidogi on the field.

I have battled in tera raids. So infrequently. That I only JUST unlocked Jacq warning me away from the black tera crystals.

I'm a champion twice over. I'm nearly done with mochi mayhem. I have more lv 100's than you can count on your hands. This might just be the funniest possible time to get this warning.

In summary:

Jacq: do NOT touch the black crackly crystals. Don't even.

I did a thing! I caught Hisuian Typhlosion in Pokémon Violet! I will forever admire and cherish the adorable ghost badger ❤️

No, the worst part is that its moves will be completely unpredictable. it will be entirely impossible to form a strategy until we've seen the beast in action.

As a special attacker, it has the signature move Psystrike, which combined with the Psychic tera-typing, will be absolutely devastating to any pokemon that isn't a Dark-type. It also has access to a powerful special attack to match almost any type. Even if we know its base type, we also know it can easily cover its weaknesses, and cover them well.

And that's if it's a pure special attacker. If it also knows any physical attacks, this raid may actually be impossible because of how thin it requires us to spread our defenses to accommodate. It gets all three elemental punches, poison jab, stone edge, foul play, and earthquake.

Not to mention, berries will be useless. So far every 7-star raid has had its hidden abilities, and frankly, Mewtwo with Unnerve is the best-case scenario. If it has Pressure, all the PP Max in the world won't get you all the way to the end of the raid.

Oh but I'm not done. We can't even predict Mewtwo's bonus actions. If it's a pure special attacker, there's every chance that it can use both Amnesia and Nasty Plot, giving itself a free +2 to special attack and special defense whenever it wants, doubling the damage it deals and halving the damage it receives. But if its also a physical attacker, we have to worry about a potential Calm Mind/Bulk Up combo, giving it a +1 bonus to all stats except Speed, which is already exceptionally high.

But even THAT might be bearable, if only we weren't expected to use Mew, a pokemon known for having the lowest passable value in every stat. Luckily, it has access to literally every TM in the game, including Steel Beam, for some reason.

I'm gonna skip pointing out the most useful information that's already on there, I don't really need to reinvent the wheel here. Instead, I'm gonna focus on how this mode encourages a different way of analyzing, choosing, and building your Pokemon, and recontextualized a bunch of stuff that was once irrelevant, and I'm gonna talk about it here on Tumblr, because Pokemon forums scare me! Here we go:

You choose your opponent (more or less), so you can specialize your builds as hard as you want. You're free to run a moveset of only Grass moves if you're up against something weak to Grass, just like being a character in Pokemon Masters. Having broad coverage doesn't really matter, unless you're on a budget and using the same Pokemon to take on a wide variety of stuff. You can also totally max out one defensive stat and ignore the other one if you only go up against physical or special attackers with that particular Pokemon. Overspecialized builds especially tend to come out for dealing with the 7-star raids, and it's fun to see the community eventually figure out and share a "solution" to the particularly hard ones. You could also just use Rage Fist Annihilape against everything, but that's not as fun.

Because the boss can't switch out, debuffs are better than buffs. When you lower the boss's stats, everyone benefits from it, including yourself (as long as you're not against something with Defiant or Competitive, oops). One Screech doubles EVERYONE's physical damage, providing far more value to your team than Swords Dance only doing that for yourself… IF the shield isn't up. Screech and Metal Sound can even be used for phase-skipping OHKO builds if your team all understands not to attack. Still, that big "if" leads into the next point:

Attacks with added effects can inflict them through shields, use them. You'll arguably get more mileage overall out of, say, Chilling Water instead of Charm, or Thunderous Kick instead of Screech, because even though it's only -1 instead of -2, you can keep doing it through the shield, and easily reapply it after the boss cleanses its debuffs rather than a tool being removed from your kit for most of the battle. Added effect attacks even count toward the attacks you need to hit the boss with before you can Terastallize, so you can deal big damage WHILE supporting your team, instead of having to choose between supporting OR Tera-ing like you do if you're just using Cheers or status moves to do everything.

Specific moves are really, really good. Or at least it's cute how much better they are than usual. Combining points 2 and 3, I basically decide what Pokemon I'm going to make a raid build for next based on if it learns the following:

Belly Drum, almost everybody has a Drain Punch Iron Hands or Shell Bell Azumarill as their first "raid mon," turns out quadrupling your Attack and using it to sustain yourself forever is pretty good actually

Attack moves guaranteed to lower a relevant stat or do something else useful (ACID SPRAY, Chilling Water, Snarl, Mud Slap, Nuzzle, etc, even Throat Chop sometimes) (bosses can't flinch though)

Life Dew, 25% heal for everyone and not limited to 3 times like the green healing Cheer, lets you save that for curing status, or use the red and blue Cheers more often, or just stick it out through a reallllly long one

Howl, +1 Attack for everyone, is mostly better than Helping Hand for physical attackers. Belly Drum users would rather have Helping Hand, defense drops, or a red offensive Cheer though, since their Attack is already maxed

Reflect and Light Screen halve damage for the whole team, they don't get cleansed when the boss removes your buffs either

Heal Pulse and Pollen Puff, unlimited single target 50% heal if someone's dying or needs to Belly Drum again. Can't self target though. Pollen Puff can heal through Good as Gold's status move immunity because it's technically an attack

Taunt, even though it's a bit hard to time and doesn't go through shield, can prevent a ton of big impact scripted moves from going off, like weather or stat buffs, or help with Yawn spammers

And then, y'know, other field effects like Safeguard, terrains, weather, etc can be good situationally

Abilities that protect the whole team like Sweet Veil can be strong counterpicks here also