On Not Finding Terastallizing Not That Useful
I’ve been playing a bit of Pokemon Scarlet lately, preparing teams in order to battle the Elite 4. Most of my farming though has been doing Tera Raids, solely for the items, since those raids don’t seem to give experience. But I’ve also been doing Tera Raids in order to try and find something interesting. I’ve… kinda failed at that so far.
The idea behind Terastallizing is pretty cool. Your Pokemon turns into its Tera type, which can be any of 18 different types, it gets all shiny and crystal-y, and gets an ugly, stupid jewel crown representing said type on its head. You then get extra damage for any move you use with the same Tera type, and it lasts until the end of the battle or if the Pokemon faints. If you find a wild Terastallized Pokemon, the Terastallization seems to end early, when it’s at 1/4 health, so you can catch it. Terastallized Pokemon in raids need to have their life fully depleted before they can be caught.
Theoretically, you can get all sorts of Terastallized Pokemon. The most recent one I caught was a level 65 Garchomp that Terastallizes into the water type. I have no idea where this might be useful, outside of fighting Fire types, but I guess it’s pretty cool. In all honesty though, I haven’t really used Terastallizing as much as I should. Most of the time, when I do use it, it’s just to boost a type even further than normal. Out of all the Pokemon I have Terastallized, 90% of that is on Meowscarada, and about 90% of those times have been against Nemona, simply because she Terastallized HER Pokemon. In a “if YOUR Pokemon is sparkly, I want to make MY Pokemon sparkly too” manner. That and I do like the shattering sound that plays when you beat the shit out of a Terastallized Pokemon.
In fact, so far, I’ve only ever made one good, non-STAB-based Terastallization, and that was on Normal, a Toxapex. This Toxapex was taking a lot of damage from ground-type moves, because it is a poison type. So I Terastallized it, turning it into a Normal type, and it survived three more ground moves before dying. Even in the fight pictured above, the Salazzle VS Sylveon, the Fire Tera type wasn’t even that useful, because I was using poison moves. The battle would have been over more quickly if I hadn’t Terastallized, because I would have kept my poison same-type attack bonus.
But we also got an entirely new type out of this! The Stellar type can only be learned as a Tera type though, and copies the defensive properties of whatever the original Pokemon’s type was. So if you have a Stellar Tera type Charmander, it’s still resistant to grass and weak to water. However, all Stellar moves are super effective against Terastallized Pokemon. I find this pretty cool, and it must be bloody awesome while doing Tera Raids, it’s mostly really only useful in the DLCs, because the special DLC legendary Pokemon will keep your Tera Orb constantly refilled. Otherwise you spend your entire time running to the nearest Tera Raid or Pokecenter, because you can normally only use the Tera Orb once per battle and it needs refilling after said battle.
On the plus side, you can at least make some abominations of your own. You just need 50 shards of the Tera type you desire. Which… might take a while. They drop from Tera Raids with a difficulty of 3 or higher, but are rare drops, and you have to do a lot of running around if you want a specific type. This is a tad easier if you have beaten the Elite Four and have access to the level 5+ raids, but those also kinda need an internet connection to play, since you can’t always rely on NPCs. Still, it’s pricey if you just want to experiment.
Honestly though, I’ve found that I kinda really just don’t need it. Scarlet and Violet’s NPCs aren’t hugely difficult, the only thing that stopped me in the past was a massive level difference. Terastallizing is a cool trick, but it still feels like a gimmick. A gimmick they added an entirely new type for. Maybe I just haven’t found any cool combinations yet. Or maybe it’s just not that useful, unless I have the DLCs or am doing a ton of Tera Raids, where you have to Terastallize due to the artificial roadblocks in the way.