by As more and more players complete the main Pokémon Scarlet and Violet storyline, many are dipping their toes into their main ongoing endgame content: Tera Raids. But increasingly, these players are expressing their displeasure with how extremely broken these raids are.
According to players, newer Pokémon games suffer from poor matchmaking, lags, long animations, unforgiving timers, bugs, and poorly equipped players that actively spoil the experience.
Here’s how Tera raids work. Players can find sparkling Tera Crystals scattered throughout the world of Paldea which, when interacted with, provide the ability to battle a powerful Terastallized Pokémon. These Pokémon are generally much more powerful than regular wild Pokémon and often have a Tera type (essentially the go-to battle gadget of this generation of Pokémon) which is rare for their kind. For example, a Gyarados (normally a Flying/Water type) can have a Tera Dragon type.
If you’re just playing Pokémon solo, you can assemble a team of three NPC trainers to join you in a 4-on-1 timed battle against these monsters. If players win before time runs out, they receive rewards such as rare items and EXP candies, as well as an opportunity to catch the Pokémon in question.
Fighting with NPCs like this works pretty well, but only up to a point. Tera Raids have a difficulty rating ranging from one to seven stars indicating how difficult the Pokémon will be to defeat within the time limit. One-, two-, three-, and four-star raids are easy enough for your average player to play solo with a crew of NPCs. But once you reach five stars, things get complicated.
Pokemon at this level have huge health pools, powerful moves, shields that need to be broken, and the ability to remove status conditions from themselves and stat boosts from player teams. But higher difficulty raids also have better rewards: better item drops, as well as more powerful and sought-after Pokémon to capture.
However, to effectively fight most five-star and above raids, you need a team of real people playing with optimized monsters. This is where the problems set in.
Tera Raids are marked on Paldean World with symbols indicating the Tera type of the Pokemon inside, as well as changes to indicate whether the raid is a Six-Star Raid or a Special Event Raid. But other than that, there’s no telling what’s inside any given crystal, making it a pain to find five-star raids with Pokemon you actually want to battle.
Because Tera types vary wildly, it’s easy to spend a lot of time galloping around Paldea to find one-, two-, and three-star crystals with low-level, less-interesting monster fights, which means the Players trying to farm endgame content might struggle to find fights worth picking up.
The alternative to this is to join someone else’s raid using the Poke Portal in the menu, but this system has its own issues. Only eight possible Tera raids will appear in the menu at a time, and the set can include anything from one-star to six-star raids, which means not all (and sometimes none of them) are raids that endgame players might want to do.
And these high level raids are filling up quick. It’s extremely difficult to get a spot in five or six star raids, and what’s worse is that the game will stay there “Connecting…” for up to a minute once a raid has been selected before it tells the player whether or not they made it. If they did, great, but if not, or a miscommunication messes up the process, they’re sent back to the same menu of eight Tera raids, only now most of the available ones have probably filled in as well. Players therefore have to wait to hit a refresh button to see a new round of raids – but that button only becomes available every few minutes.
In short, a lot of online Tera raid battles sit on the same menu just expect, hoping that you will eventually see a raid you want to do and can actually participate in it.
Once you’re actually in a Tera raid, the problems expose themselves. One design change from Sword and Shield’s Dynamax raids that should be welcomed is that now all players take their turns at the same time, so battles are sped up without having to watch each turn unfold one by one. The downside, however, is that Scarlet and Violet’s major issues with online lag and bugs, along with some weird design decisions, turned this feature into a nightmare.
I love when I can’t attack for more than 30 seconds in tera raid battles! pic.twitter.com/Z1vqLgNw5l
— birbdon (@birbdon) November 27, 2022
Because the timer is always running, players have a certain window to select their moves before it skips their turn; but if the game is late, players may only have a second to choose a move, or no time at all. Menus can freeze on screen with no ability to select anything, or the game can just hang around for periods of time without any on-screen characters doing anything.
HP bars don’t always accurately reflect a Pokemon’s health at any given time, meaning it’s difficult to time the use of healing abilities. Terastallizing your own Pokemon – something the game actively recommends you do at some stage in the fight – results in a long animation where the timer continues to tick, and a similar delay occurs when using moves, held objects or abilities that produce a lot of text or on-screen animations.
the monster in the game is so sick and twisted that it gives a time limit to tera raid battles knowing that it takes 598587 years for this game to record every movement animation
— 👻 (@jaybrielz) November 27, 2022
Basically, raids are total chaos. Movements trigger at seemingly random times, turns are skipped, health bars are everywhere, and it’s often impossible to tell what’s happening at any given time.
And all of that assuming everyone showed up to the raid with Pokemon good for it. Five-Star Raids, while challenging, are fairly easily accessible to almost any player who has completed the Pokémon Story Mode as well as a bit of end-game bonus content. As a result, many players show up to these fights with Pokémon ill-equipped to take on such powerful bosses.
The r/Pokemon subreddit is full of complaints about players bringing weak Pokémon to the monsters they fight, or who are clearly low level or don’t have the stats or movesets to face the toughest challenges. . Sure, it’s not exactly a ten-year-old’s fault that he doesn’t know how EV training works, but when weak Pokemon teams are compounded by all the lag issues, it makes raids It will be a miserable experience for many.
I got stuck unable to do anything in a Tera Raid. These things are buggy mess lmao pic.twitter.com/1yR1qHcRic
— KayJay (@KayJaySSB) November 22, 2022
For a pretty good (and hilarious) summary of it all, a now-locked Reddit thread titled “TERA RAID RAGE THREAD” urged users to share their frustration with the raid system, and the comments (all caps) actually cover it all. what we’ve discussed above. For a calmer look, a search on r/Pokemon for “Tera raid” around the time this was written brings up, in the top eight results, topics like “The Tera Raid search system is totally broken.. .”, “Tera Raid Battles Bugged”, “Tera Raid Battles are borderline unplayable”, “Tera Raid Time and Lag”, and “Anyone else frustrated with Tera Raids?” It’s a mess.
While for now the most difficult raids available are six-star raids, players are worried about an upcoming event that will further increase the challenge. From December 1-4 and December 15-18, a seven-star Charizard — a Pokemon not otherwise available in Scarlet and Violet — will appear in Tera Raids. Given the difficulty of six-star raids, it seems likely that this Charizard will be tough to beat and will require coordinated and powerful teams of four players working together.
But right now, that level of coordination is nearly impossible for many due to the messiness of the online system. It remains to be seen whether more high-level players will be able to get their hands on the coveted dragon when it does show up – especially since Game Freak has yet to release any statements on the state Scarlet and Violet are in. are out, or whether a patch is on the way or not.
The Tera raid feature was just one of the many issues we encountered during our review of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. In that review, we said the games’ open-world gameplay was “a brilliant direction for the future of the franchise, but this promising change is sabotaged by the many ways Scarlet and Violet feel deeply unfinished.”
Rebekah Valentine is a reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.
