Pokemon Sword and Shield introduced a new aspect to the game: Max Raids! In these modes, you join either 3 NPCs or 3 other playing characters and fight a Pokémon who is Dynamaxed (or very big and very strong) in an attempt to catch it!. Here are some tips on what to expect for these battles!
There are varying levels of difficulty.
From when you start the game to finishing the story, there are five different levels of difficulties, labeled by stars. The higher the stars? The higher the reward. 5 star raids will have Pokémon with the best stats and more items, but are also quite a bit tougher!
You don’t have a ton of room for mess ups.
In the raid, you have a limited number of turns and faints. If you get in a team with a member who may need some work on their type charts, you could lose the raid if there are more than 4 faints in the Pokémon team. This could be the entire team, or this could be one member four times. Either way is a failure. If you pass by 10 turns as well, that would also be enough to count you out for the count.
There are two types of beams in the sky.
When looking around the sky, looking for raids, you may see multiple colors. The most common ones are red/pink in color and are a bit more wispy. If you sit and watch them you can almost see smaller little beams of light passing over each other. Then there’s the purple one. The purple beam means one of two things: Gigantimax or increased chance of amazing stats. These raids are a lot rarer and tougher, but are so worth it.
Barriers? They get annoying..
Once you get into 3 star raids and higher, you’ll notice the phrase ‘Pokémon is getting desperate! It put up a barrier to defend against attacks!’. This can be anything from just two of three bars all the way to like 8. A normal attack (super effective or not) is one bar taken off, a Dynamaxed attack is two bars taken off. These bars I’ve seen will pop up up to three times per battle: After the first hit, after the bar goes yellow, and close to the bar going red.
NPCs are just fine in the beginning, but after 3 star, kind of suck.
The raid battles are defiantly a way to bring people together and to promote the network connection aspect of the game. In the beginning of the game, it’s pretty easy to take down anything even with NPCs joining. Once you get into the 4 and 5 star raids, it gets a lot tougher very quickly. Many of the final matches you cannot do without actual people help unless you’re pretty far in the late game.
Spawn points will change based on events
Every month, or so it seems, a new Dynamax or Gigantimax raid is featured. This can be one from the storyline or can be one that was created after the fact that comes in an update. Regardless, keeping flexible and changing grinding tactics may be crucial to getting the Shiny Gigantimax mon you’re hunting!
