PokémonScarlet and Violet offer some new and interesting gameplay ideas. The Team Star Raids allow you to make use of the Auto Battle feature, while Tera Raid Battles provide a cooperative spin on the Terastal phenomenon of Paldea. However, the implementation of Tera Raid Battles need improvements in various areas, especially in the online setting.
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Tera Raid Battles (explained in more detail here) allow you to work with other trainers to take down a Tera Pokémon. While Pokémon normally have a Tera Type that’s the same as one of its usual type, Tera Pokémon in crystallized dens come with rarer Tera Types. Winning these battles comes with special rewards, such as Tera Shards or Exp. Candies.
The rewards can increase in rarity the higher the level, yet the difficulty will naturally increase as well. While you start out with having 4-star raids as the highest, you can unlock battles up to 6 stars as you progress further, with special 7-star raids as part of special events. It’s when you reach these higher levels that raid battles begin to fall apart. While there are a variety of issues, I’ll focus on the most egregious ones.
First off, thanks to the mode’s time-based structure. In Tera Raid Battles, you don’t have to worry about waiting on the rest of your teammates to make a move against the Tera Pokémon. Except, with that change also comes the entire battle having a time limit, where you’ll have to deplete the Tera Pokémon’s HP before it runs out. On the upside, this allows each player to battle against the Pokémon at their own pace, which is great for the possibility of teammates becoming inactive during the battle. However, there are a few key downsides, most notably the pace of combat.
Battles progress at a sluggish pace when it comes to performing moves, increasing stats, and activating abilities. This is a problem that encompasses the entirety of the Gen 9 Pokémon titles, but it’s in Tera Raid Battles that this problem is at its worst. Time is essential in Tera Raids, and it can get wasted through no fault of your own as combat drags on.
to fix this, the combat system would need to be as snappy as it was in Pokémon Legends: Arceus. The speed of battles there made sense due to how different Arceus gameplay worked, but it was a welcomed change. Doing something similar for Pokémon Scarlet and Violet could be as simple as showing the stat change effect, along with listing all the stats that are affected at one time. Much more can be done to speed up battling in this game, but tweaking these aspects alone would make a huge difference. More importantly, it would stop wasting everyone’s time.
Another problem is how raids handle penalties. While there isn’t an exact limit to how often Pokémon can faint, your team is penalized with a time reduction on the Tera Raid Battle with each faint. This isn’t a problem on its own, but it also makes it so that you have to spend a certain amount of time out of battle, which increases exponentially.
Obviously, the longer a Pokémon is out of battle, the less they can faint and cost the team time. However, that also limits their contributions to the success of the raid, since you may’t even cheer for your teammates. It also doesn’t make much sense when paired with the setback of the lost raid time, making for excessive punishment.
Removing one of these penalties, or allowing you to do more while unable to battle, would be a solid fix. I personally think the increased time with each faint should be removed. It would get rid of an unnecessary setback while retaining the incentive of keeping your Pokémon in the field. As for allowing you to do more while your Pokémon can’t battle, that’s simple: you should be able to do cheers. It’s not something your Pokémon does anyway, so being unable to do it while your Pokémon is reviving belabors how unnecessary this is.
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Speaking of cheers, the issues don’t end there. To assist your entire team in battle, you get three different cheers, each with unique effects: “Go all out!”, for offensive buffs; “Hang tough!”, for defensive buffs; and “Heal up!”, for HP and status restoration. you may use any of these cheers up to three times. The problem here is less with the buffs and more with how ineffective and pointless they can be in the grand scheme of Tera Raids.
The “Heal up!” cheer heals your team with a random amount of HP. You can either get healed fully, or by a very insignificant chunk. The only way to have a chance of mitigating this is if more than one person uses their healing cheer, but it’s still inexplicably based on chance. This makes it hard to encourage players to heal, unless everyone’s Pokémon has a status condition on them. Why take a gamble at any other time?
As for the other buffs, they can be wiped by the Tera Pokémon at nearly any time, along with the party’s Abilities (for some reason). This makes it hard to encourage boosting everyone’s offense and defense by using the cheers, since you can do so to greater effect with a move of your own; not to mention that you can’t see how much your stats are boosted through the cheers anyway. Paired with the previously mentioned inability to cheer outside of battle, as well as how cheering wastes a whole turn, the game makes the mechanic too limiting and unpredictable for the players.
The healing issue can be fixed by just making the heals do a set amount. It doesn’t need to be full, but half a Pokémon’s HP would be very fair and useful. As for the other cheers, their efforts shouldn’t be negated so easily. The Tera Pokémon should at least be unable to act for a turn for each person when doing it. This makes all the things they can do less unfair and goes a step further to negate how much time they waste.
The rest of the issues with the Tera Raid Battles can be chalked up to the game’s turbulent development. It already runs pretty badly most of the time, but when it comes to trying to do Tera Raid Battles, it’s even worse. It takes forever to join a lobby, often failing since you’re stuck waiting for so long. The list of available Raid Battles takes minutes to refresh while the parties can get full within seconds. I still have yet to successfully join a Tera Raid Battle from the list since launch, and I imagine I’m not alone.
Plus the latency of the online battles means that everyone’s more or less fighting their own battle, if even that, with the raid locking out of performing actions. There are also a number of bugs and glitches that affect your progress with the battle, the most popular one being the Play Rough move’s damage not properly calculating. The warning that the battle is almost lost happens so close to when you run out of time, sometimes directly before it, that you’re able to’t even make a move. That these are just a handful of the issues plaguing it is dismal - the mode needs cleaning up.
This all isn’t to say that Tera Raid Battles aren’t funwhen they work. They can be pretty entertaining, and the rewards are often worth the effort. However, it shouldn’t be so hard to access and play what’s already meant to be the most challenging content in the game. Considering certain items, likeAbility Patches, are only availably by defeating the harder Tera Raids, the soonr GameFreak fixes these issues, the better.
