GamePress

Predicting Raid Boss Fast Move?

I faced Groudon for the first time last night, and noticed that the game put up all my Dragonite in the 'recommended' team. Like many others, I usually go with the Gamepress raid counter guide rather than the game recommendations. In response to a question I asked a few days ago, it was mentioned that the only way to tell which fast move is being used is by the animation. However, given that dragon tail beats up on Dragonite, but Mud Shot does neutral damage . . .

Or, like many other things, am I reading something wrong? I have plenty of good water and grass types to choose from.

I haven't paid any attention to fast move animations, so I still don't know which fast move Groudon was using, but I went with Dragonite, we won the raid, and I won a 93% new Pokedex entry.

Asked by stacysmom10256 years 2 months ago

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Mud Shot would bounce off a Dragonite. It's flying type makes MS doubly-NVE, not neutral. If you paid attention to the health bar you could easily notice a difference between losing 2hp per the boss's fast move (MS) or upwards or 20hp per fast move (DT).

Given that Dragonite handily resists every single attack of Groudon's bar Dragon Tail I would assume any time you see Dragonite in your recommended to expect it to know Mud Shot. Having said that, Dragonite trails pretty heavily far behind more optimized grass, water, and ice types.

Perhaps if someone else explained that to me with a little less tone, I might have a chance of learning something.

Tone? Nothing I said was factually incorrect.

Mud Shot has a sort of brown splash animation and Dragonite would lose a barely noticeable sliver of health with each hit since it has an immunity-tier resistance to ground attacks, not neutral as stated in your original post. Dragon Tail has a sort of indigo swipe/cloud motion and would take decently big chunks out of its health due to being super effective and also having larger base damage (DT 15 compared to MS 5).

Dragonite also has much lower DPS against Groudon than many more specialized water, grass, and ice type attackers. Regardless of it being recommended you should use those other types to optimize your damage output. The recommended teams tend to favor survive-ability over DPS, though I think it has been tweaked somewhat since initial implementation because I've seen some newly-obtained Hydro Cannon Feraligatr in the mix.

Not harping on you here, but since you asked about tone, my guess is the "if you paid attention to your health bar" bit came off as a bit snarky to the OP.
Still a very informative post.

Inresponse to the biggest leaf’s second post.

Thank you for your thorough and factual replies. For the record, my preselected Groudon team included the types you suggested. I was surprised to see Dragonite in the auto select, and posed my question. I don’t often go with the auto select but it worked out. This is the second time that you responded to a question of mine in a less than flattering manner. Perhaps I overreacted and perhaps you can be aware that your knowledge might get lost on the reader if the reader is distracted by what may not have been intended as snark.

My guess here is that the Groudon had Solar Beam, so the game recommended Dragonite because it (like all the flying Dragons) double resists Grass. If it had Mud Shot as well, yet another reason to go with Dragons.

However, Dragonite doesn't have the highest DPS against Groudon. So that's the trade-off, you lose DPS and gain durability. If the raid is secure (lots of people raiding with you, and you're not worried about a damage ball or two), Dragonite is fine. If it's close, you might want to put up pokemon with higher DPS, and take the damage.

You can sometimes tell which fast move the boss has from the autoselect suggestion, but this requires pretty good knowledge of types and your own pokemon.

In the case of Groudon's MS vs DT, there would be a massive difference in how much damage they deal to Dragonite, like BiggestLeaf explained. Even against an attacker that takes neutral from both, DT deals a fair bit more damage, which you will be able to notice with a bit of practice.

Generally you should worry about DPS first and survivability later. Dragonite deals neutral damage which doesn't even begin to compare with SE damage from good grass, water or ice-types. You don't generally want to use mons that get one-shot by a charge move from the boss (so no grass types against FB Groudon and no pure water types against SoB Groudon), but other than that, go with super effective attackers over the Dragonites. Gyarados is phenomenal in that it'll be fine against any charge move and deal good damage.

First, nice username.

Second, yes you can use the recommended mon list to try to predict what the raid boss' moveset will be. If you're getting dnite recommended... well it resists solar beam, eq, and fire blast, so I'd assume it's also resisting the fast move (which would have to be mud shot).

I have a son named Kyle. The Sputhpark song that came out at the same time as Stacy’s Mom was a lot less flattering to me. My pogo screen name is nikosnina, Niko is my grand boy and he calls me Nina. Thanks for noticing. You made my day.

I would just like to add one last thing to all the informative answers here. You might just need to build 3 specialist teams during this round of raids.

1) Pure WATER types for Groudon. Works against all movesets except Solar Beam. If your autoselect is skipping on them fishes, go with...

2. Pure GRASS types: This team can be used against both Groudon and Kyogre with great DPS results.
-Against Groudon: If your AS is favoring ROCKS, GROUND, or even DRAGON types, you can expect Fire Blast as its charge move so you should go with team #1.
Against Kyogre: This team is amazing resisting HP and Thunder. If the AS is skipping over those vegetables and favoring ICE or WATER types (perhaps your own Kyogre) but no DRAGONS , then you can expect Blizzard so you better go with...

3) Pure electric types. This should be composed of as many Raikou, Electivire, and Jolteon as possible, but any fillers will do in a big-enough lobby. Zapdos can shoot off two charge moves in between Kyogre's blizzards if you're lucky, which is a great amount of damage. I would make this your go-to team against Kyogre, unless you have higher level GRASS types, in which case they will excel against Thunder variants which you'll have to predict (if AS is favoring DRAGONS or ELECTRIC types).

You can mix up your teams types a bit, but I believe it is faster to start off with these three options and take your time to predict the boss' moveset accordingly. If you join early enough you can build a custom team in case you think you might need it 'cause of weather or whatever, but I strongly believe it is better to do it this way.
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Furthermore, you should begin your reading of the auto-select starting with your selection's resistances to the bosses' charge moves.
Groudon's Fire Blast will (almost always) exclude all GRASS (Venusaur, Sceptile, Kantonian Eggy) types from your AS, Solar Beam will exclude all WATER types (Kyogre, Feraligatr) except Gyarados that takes neutral damage from it (while also heavily favoring the likes of Ho-oh, Moltres, and Heatran), and Earthquake will exclude all ROCK (Ttar), GROUND (other Groudon you own), and STEEL types (Metagross). FLYING DRAGONS do well against all three so them being excluded is a big giveaway of its fast move.
Kyogre only has one fast move so it is easier to read and predict. No GRASS or DRAGON types means Blizzard. No WATER types and a lot of GRASS types (especially A-Exeggutor) means Thunder. A lot of Alolan Exegutor means HP, assuming you have several of them. This last one should be considered as the exception after having gone through an elimination process of the other two.

And so on...

I should have asked does auto select know what set is in play, and we all could have gone on to something else. Auto select makes bad choices but I might be able to learn what the move set is by examining its choices.

Thanks to all of you for sharing your impressive depth of knowledge. I learned more than I hoped for.

I assumed this was what you were going for from the way you phrased the title of this question.
Auto-select makes GREAT choices for the survival of your team. It chooses your most-likely-to-survive Pokemon by focusing on their resistances and defensive stats and follows up by their attacks, prioritizing STAB and SE over neutral, but still more heavily tilted towards your survival. This is why you can make educated guesses based on you auto-selected teams if you know both your Pokemon and the bosses' movesets.
Unfortunately, the usual suspects chosen by this algorithm rarely have the attack stat to both carry themselves throughout the battle AND beat the boss before the timer runs out, which is why they never get recommended and why knowledgeable players always try to discourage their use in raids since titans like Groudon and Kyogre can become downright impossible to beat without the proper damage-dealers. If raids had unlimited timers to beat them -or at least triple the current amount- many auto-selected matchups against many of the legendaries would be doable in medium-sized groups with very little expenditure of revives and potions. The obvious drawback is that they would take thrice as long to beat, but I guess a lot of rural players would welcome this trade-off if it was possible anyways.

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