Everything you need to know about alleged Pokemon GO raid battle changes

In August, many players noticed some changes that were being made to Pokemon GO's raid battle system. While the community is familiar with the occasional balance change or new additions to the catalog of available bosses, the new changes affect raiding in the title on a much larger scale. This becomes much more important with news of Niantic bringing new Dynamax raids into the game following the start of the Max Out season on September 3rd.

Since these changes are still new, members of the Silph Road community are still researching them. Silph Road started as a resource website, tracking raid bosses, Team GO Rocket member teams, and many more. Now, most of the community sticks to the group's subreddit. Here is everything that is currently known about these alleged changes being made to the game's beloved raid battles.

Analyzing changes made to Pokemon GO's raid battles

Raid battles are some of the most beloved parts of Pokemon GO, so many players may feel uneasy about these changes (Image via Niantic)

The first change is one that will make Mega Raids considerably easier. Rather than using regular base stats for the Mega Evolved Raid Boss, the stats used to determine the boss' strength pull from the base form of the Mega Evolution instead. This means that if players are fighting a Mega Manectric, the boss will have the base stats of a standard Manectric instead.

This is believed to be a current bug present in Pokemon GO, as the same is true for the player's Mega Evolved Pokemon as well. If used in any raid, the player's Mega Evolutions will still have the same base stats that they had before Mega Evolving. As such, players should avoid Mega Evolving their Pokemon for raid battles until this issue is addressed.

Also Read: Mega Evolution: Exploring the lore behind the Pokemon battle gimmick

Players may also notice that Raid Bosses are using Charged Attacks more. This is because they are now programmed to use their Charged Attacks as soon as they have enough energy to use them. Before, these bosses would only use Charged Attacks if they had the energy to use them 50% of the time after using a Fast Attack.

Additionally, Raid Bosses now generate less energy when they are damaged by the player and their raid party. While the exact amount of energy gained has yet to be confirmed, it has been confirmed that the energy generation rate has been reduced significantly from previous updates to raid battles.

Finally, damage calculation has been readjusted to reflect that of Pokemon GO's competitive Battle League, with damage being dealt in consistent intervals of half of a second. This means that moves that last for any fraction of a second will have their damage actually done to the boss every half of a second, rather than allowing for damage to be done freely to the boss.

Overall, the changes done to Pokemon GO's raid battles seem to be an attempt to make these fights fall more in line with competitive Battle League battles. This may have been done to make battles more uniform across the game, making them easier to fix and work on from a developer's standpoint.

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Edited by Abhishek Manikandan