On Using The Right Counters

During the Hoenn Tour, one of the main features was doing raids. We were raiding for Groudon and Kyogre, which had reverted into their Primal forms, making them much, much more powerful. They had a  CP of about 90,000 each, which is nearly double what normal legendary Pokemon have. So, in order to defeat these monsters, we needed to use the best teams possible. Did we all do that? Well, I did.

Organized teams

I had separate teams for both Kyogre and Groudon. Against Primal Groudon, I used a collection of (normal) Kyogres, while using a Mega Gyarados to boost my allies. I could have used Swampert too, but I just prefer the giant semi-draconic water wyrm. Unlike normal Groudon, Primal Groudon is a ground type AND a fire type. So you can’t use grass or ice types, the best you can do is use water, which Primal Groudon is doubly weak to.

For Kyogre on the other hand, options were somewhat limited. Both grass and electric are good weaknesses, but Primal Kyogre lacks the double weakness, and has plenty of moves to fuck over attackers. Blizzard wipes out grass moves with ease, while electric doesn’t really resist any of Kyogre’s attacks. Either way, with a grass team or an electric team, things really did hurt. My team consisted of a Mega Sceptile, as well as a bunch of Kartanas and some Venusaurs along the way. I also had an electric team mostly consisting of Zekroms and Raikous, just in case.

My point is, for these tough battles, I at least had several teams ready to go against both these bosses. A team of water for Groudon and a team of grass for Kyogre. However, as I did more raids, I noticed that, well, some weird Pokemon were being used. The times when I had to use a second team (or third, for one particularly mean Kyogre and too few people), at least all the Pokemon recommended were the right types. I can’t say the same about other people though.

What about other people?

What made me realize how bad things were was when I was invited to a Primal Kyogre raid in the US, via someone on my friends list. As I jumped in, I realized we were in a full team of 20 people. That’s a very rare thing to see if you live in a semi-rural area like me, with a small amount of players. Seeing those 20 people, I assumed that the raid would go extremely fast. Well, it… it didn’t. In fact, doing the raid only netted me 90 primal energy. It was enough for me to finally be able to primal revert a Kyogre, but I kinda assumed the raid would go faster than it did.

The reason why is because not everyone was using optimal counters.

Now, I know that not everyone is level 40+ like I am. But the Pokemon I was seeing were pretty… bad. I can understand using a Alolan Exeggutor, since it’s a grass type and Kyogre dislikes grass. I can get people using the odd Jolteon here and there. I get that sometimes your second party isn’t nearly as good as your first team. When you’re a low level player, you have to use what you’ve got. In that 20 player raid though, most of the players were level 35+. And by then, you should have at least one team ready to go.

But no, in that raid, I saw all sorts of Pokemon, right from the start. I saw Mewtwos, I saw Rayquazas and, for reasons unknown, I also saw a lot of Garchomps. Why? No clue, aside from the fact that it rarely appeared in the Recommended Party. Garchomp brings absolutely nothing to the table though, being weak to all of Kygore’s attacks aside from Thunder, and doing not very effective damage to the boss.

I mostly blame the recommended party for the people using these mismatched Pokemon. But come on, surely, if you look at Kyogre, the massive water whale, surely you’d pick SOMETHING that does super effective damage. Water, fire and ground have a lot of memorable weaknesses. But I put more blame on players being lazy, being used to 20-player raids. As long as you have 6-8 people who know what they are doing, everyone else can just goof off and use whatever they want.

Seriously though, is it too much to ask to bring Pokemon that at least do super effective damage? That’d be great. Even if it is just an Alolan Exeggcutor or two. At the very least, don’t bring a Garchomp to a Kyogre that knows Blizzard. That’s just asking for trouble…