Falinks Raid Day and Some Raid Weirdness

There’s something fucky going on with raids right now. The raid bosses are broken. I noticed this first when doing a Lucario raid (need that XL Candy!) and I noticed that the raid boss was doing charge attacks way more often than normal. Later on, I was invited to a Kyogre raid and I realized something was very, very wrong. It basically did Blizzard after Blizzard after Blizzard. In fact, the Kyogre was doing Blizzard charge attacks as fast or faster than my own Pokemon were. Thankfully, there were 17 people in this raid and the Kyogre still died (and I got another 2* while brother got a shiny – typical) but if that had been a raid with far less people, I would have easily gone through more teams.

I haven’t done a Kyogre raid since, as I don’t trust other players to have the right counters. But, Falinks Raid Day was a chance to have a look at this further and see how bad things were. They weren’t amazing.

Thankfully, Falinks is a 3* raid, meaning it can easily be soloed. At least, normally it can. I have a level 43 Mega Rayquaza on hand and that resists all of Falinks’s charge attacks (Brick Break, Superpower, Megahorn). I also had a Shadow Mewtwo at about level 38 (they’re expensive to power up), as well as a party of 4 other unique Pokemon: Gardevoir, Salamence with Fly, my level 50 Noivern and a Moltres at the end. In 6 of the 7 raids I did, I only needed the Shadow Mewtwo and the Mega Rayquaza. In the second raid I did, My Rayquaza didn’t make it, and my Gardevoir finished off the boss. After that, I switched them around, with Shadow Mewtwo using the Mega Rayquaza buff, then Mega Rayquaza itself ending the raid. For the last three raids, the weather turned to Windy, so all my attacks were weatherboosted.

However, that Falinks was rapid-firing attacks the entire time. It was constantly spamming charge attacks, at one point doing 4-5 in a row. This wasn’t too bad with Brick Break, because it does very little damage, but Megahorn was a problem for Mewtwo. Gardevoir though, being part Fairy type, was fine.

Turns out, they’ve increased how much ‘energy’ raid bosses get from being damaged.

So, in a raid, both you and the raid boss gain energy to do charge attacks, and you also gain energy from being damaged. You can do your charge attacks whenever, and the raid boss will kinda do them at random once they have the ability to do so. When the new season came out though, raid bosses were changed to fire off a charge attack as soon as they had enough energy to do so. This would theoretically be fine, in fact, it might actually help making charge attacks more predictable. HOWEVER the amount of damage that is converted into energy from raid bosses was changed from around 2% to about 50%. So raid bosses can get their charge attacks about as fast as you can.

Thankfully, in Falink’s case, it has standard stats and its moves are mostly resisted by the Pokemon you’re using. It’s also a level 3 raid. Kyogre in a level 5 raid though, with its legendary stats, well, that monster will just tear you apart.

I suppose at least I got a shiny and a 96% one. Out of 7 raids though, I got 2 3* and 5 2* Pokemon. This has been my luck lately. I get NOTHING but 2* Pokemon most of the time. I have been going hard looking for the “catch 8 pokemon” research task to get a good Sobble, Scorbunny and Grookey, and, out of 12 tasks (turns out, they’re kinda rare), I’ve gotten 1 single good Pokemon worth keeping. The three Dynamax Pokemon I got? Two of them are close to lowest stats possible (10/11/10 and 10/10/13) and the other is also a 2* but only slightly better. It feels like the game has been fucking me over more than normal lately. Frankly, it’s a small miracle I got a shiny from an event because normally I don’t.

Either way, wasn’t worth. I didn’t get any Rare XL Candy. Did get plenty of Rare Candy (which I fed to my shadow Mewtwo) and managed to restock on potions a little, but Falinks isn’t of any use anywhere, it didn’t get any special moves like most raid day Pokemon do, the only new thing was the shiny. In my eyes, it was only worth the 7 free raid passes.

Oh well. Raids are weird. I recommend getting more people for level 5 raids, just in case.