I just did my first raid and it was an Ivysaur. It was fairly easy but how often should I do raids? I see many people talking about raids and I just did one. I literally never did even when I saw bosses like Magikarp. I'm not really a new player I just stopped playing pokemon go after the first month it got released and started again on late september of this year.
You get 1 free pass a day but you can only hold one free pass in your bag, so if you have a free pass and also haven't picked up your pass for today, you should do any raid to not waste it.
Even it's a low level raid you'll still get some small rewards, some golden razz are guaranteed, and if you're lucky some rare candies or a TM.
Raids have totally transformed the game for me, going from a pretty much solitary affair (well, the spouse and I) doing nothing but collecting mon and occasionally battling gyms to a social game that consumes most of our evenings during the week and weekends. We've met an awesome group of people, many of whom are now considered friends outside of the game. So that by itself makes raids worth the price of admission for me (yes, I buy as many passes as I need, based on what the group is doing on any given day).
But on a more tangible level, you get rewards like TMs, rare candies, and golden raspberries. And the higher level of raid (which requires more people), the greater the chance of reward. They also give an incentive to power up your mon and learn more about move sets and typings and what will work when. And they give you a chance to catch pretty meta-relevant mon with pretty good IVs. (The lowest IVs you can get from a raid is a 10/10/10; the same as from an egg.) You can also set personal goals, like soloing a tier 3 raid or trying to do a tier 4 or 5 with as few players as possible.
TL;DR version: you can get rewards like TMs and rare candies, add a bit of challenge/goal setting to the game, and meet some cool and interesting people. How much or little you do, of course, is up to you.
Do Raids every day, or every other day (when you can do two). Join Discord and get on your local server to find other players to raid with because if you've just picked it back up again, you probably don't have a decent line up - one able to Solo the Level 3's, who are probably the most useful overall of all the Raid Pokémon.
They're probably the most beneficial aspect of the game right now. They generally give you evolved Pokémon - some of them will save you 123 Candies and give you very useful pokemon (Alakazam, Machamp, Golem, Tyranitar, etc.) which are high IV and Level 20. You can spend your candies on powering them up instead of evolving them, which is massively useful for ones like Tyranitar. You also get Rare Candies and Golden Razzberries, which are awesome, and the occasional Fast or Charge TM to change the moves of a Pokémon.
They're worth doing every day, even at the lower levels.
