QoL changes that should be added for Tera Raid Battles in my opinion

TLPenn · July 30

After doing Tera Raid Battles with random players online today, only to be frustrated by players joining using Pokémon that will get knocked out in 2 hits from a super effective move from the 6-Star Boss, I figured I'd make a post to give some of my personal ideas for improving the raid experience. I've been doing Tera Raid Battles, mostly the 6-Star ones, for years at this point, so I feel confident in saying that I have enough experience with the raiding system to put forward some potential changes/solutions that could significantly improve the raiding experience, particularly when queueing with random players online, which is my go-to way of playing. This has been brewing in my head for a long time now, so forgive me for the wall of text, but I finally felt like I needed to get my word out on this in the hope that things will change for the better. 😊

1. Fix UI bugs that occasionally pop up when queuing for raids. So many times, I hang on the Raid UI 'cause I think someone hasn't readied up, only to realize after readying myself that they had, despite the green checkmark not present. There's also instances where I can't even see the Pokémon themselves, or the UI doesn't show when a player changes their Pokémon. It can be frustrating not seeing if someone has readied up and hanging on the queue for no reason. It's also frustrating waiting for someone to change an obviously bad Pokémon, only to realize they readied up with that bad Pokémon

2. Show Pokémon Levels at raid queue preview. Sometimes I'll queue with a player with a seemingly good Pokémon for the raid, only for them to INSTANTLY faint because they're 40 levels lower than the raid boss. This can be really frustrating, as it only wastes everyone else's time doing the raid with one player not contributing 'cause they keep fainting, and actively hindering the team when they take up a chunk of the timer every time they faint. Showing the levels would help greatly when doing 6-7 Star Raids, as it's much more productive to disband the team and requeue than to start a raid with effectively one less player. I would even go so far as to say that also showing Tera Types on the queue screen would help, too; I just did a 6-Star Tera Fire Alolan Golem Raid with a Garchomp I thought was seemingly good, only to realize that it was Tera WATER, leaving it weak to Golem's electric type moves once it Terastalized and fainting soon afterwards. Either or both of these would significantly improve the raiding experience, as new/inexperienced players won't always know what's good to bring, and queue with the frail Greninja or Charizard and quickly faint, so it's better to disband the raid in hopes they move on to easier raids. I'm tempted to say showing their items in team preview would be nice, too, but it's really only applicable to players who don't know that Shell Bell is a great item for Raids.

3. Decrease the amount of downtime from ability pop-ups, stat boosts, or item activations. Sometimes, it can be frustrating to sit through a bunch of text boxes for ability activations (i.e. Unnerve, Drought), Item procs (Booster Energy, Electric Seed, Berries, and especially Leftovers), or stat boosts (6-Star Kommo-o), particularly when you aren't the one activating these, so it'd be nice if players wouldn't have to sit through every time a teammate's leftovers activates, or the text boxes would be shortened/sped up when a Raid Boss like Kommo-o boosts all its stats with Clangerous Soul, and we have to sit through as each boost gets it's own slow text box for it, or even when Sinistcha uses Matcha Gotcha, and we have to watch as EVERY player's energy gets sapped and/or burns get proc'd. It'd be really nice, especially for tight games where you're so close to losing via timer; that way, you wouldn't be guaranteed to lose just because the boss made a series of prolonged text boxes waste your time.

4. Let players change items/moves while in queue. This is mainly applicable to when someone is queueing from the Tera Raid Battle Search as opposed to directly hosting. Part of why I stick to hosting over searching outside of event raids is because I might not have the exact moves or item right one some of my Pokémon, even if they're otherwise a good pick to bring to a raid. As a host, you can change as much as you want about your Pokémon before starting a raid, but everyone else is stuck using 'mons they may have prepared for a specific raid, but don't work for the one they're trying to join. I'm not sure if there's any technical limitations for why this isn't possible, so if the game literally can't handle it, then I'd say it's fine to skip this one; I just felt it would make joining raids as a non-host much more convenient.

5. Give the host the option to kick players in the raid queue. This is definitely a far more contentious idea, but I think it's worth bringing forward. As I've mentioned before, a lot of the time, players will queue into raids with obviously bad Pokémon, and the only option is to disband the raid and requeue. While this usually isn't a big deal outside of wasting time, it can be especially frustrating if other teammates have good picks to bring to the raid, and you're forced to disband them because one player brought a bad pick, hoping in vain that the good players keep trying to rejoin. However, if the host can kick individual players from a raid, that would only affect players who choose bad picks, and not the players who bring good picks. At this point, I'm frustrated enough with how often people bring Pokemon, seemingly not knowing that the Raid Boss will have super effective coverage for them (even when the Boss's base STABS are super-effective), that I'd be more than happy to just give those players the boot as I look for actually competent people who know what they're doing for 6-7 Star Raids. There's very little margin for error with most of the hardest Raids, so I feel being picky about what other people bring is only natural to avoid losing.

6. Do something about all the blatantly illegal Pokémon being distributed via Wonder Trading. This may not seem immediately applicable to Raids, but I've done enough to say that a LOT of people seem to rely on them, which is not helpful, since most of them are trained for competitive battles, not raids. They'll usually be very frail, since they're hacked in to be trained in speed, and will carry suboptimal moves like Close Combat or useless items like Ability Patches that don't help. In general, they won't have any good means of supporting the team, either. Often times, players gullible enough to bring these illegal Pokémon will often not contribute to the Raid enough, and will just faint and waste the timer. I think finding SOME way of detecting and preventing these sort of hacked Pokémon from being tradeable like they are in Pokémon Home would help greatly. I'd say it'd be pretty easy, too, since many of the hacks are blatant; they're all shiny (Unless they're legendaries that can't be), with perfect, non-Hyper Trained stats in the Judge, have nicknames/Original Trainer names that are just a website that distributes even MORE hacked Pokémon, are usually said to come from an egg (Or Area Zero if they're a Paradox Pokémon), and some of them even have every Ribbon that's available to said Pokémon. Eliminating these from the Wonder Trade pool would encourage players to build their own Pokémon and not just assume that these hacked Shinies are perfect for raids as-is.

I believe that's everything I can think of as to what could be done to improve Tera Raid Battles. I know some of these are outlandish, but if even my first two suggestions are heeded, those alone would DRAMATICALLY make the experience a hundred times better! Dunno if Game Freak will ever see this themselves, but I do hope they're still looking for feedback, and I hope Scarlet and Violet will still see at least one more patch before they move on to Legends: Z-A and whatever Generation 10 might be. 😀