One thing that rustles my jimbos is how the online basically doesn't work and how the 5 star Max Raid Battles are clearly designed for online play only.
So, for anyone who isn't playing, I'll explain. You meet up with a big pokemon with way more HP then normal that spams nu-Z moves, normal moves, and a few special mechanics. Usually 2-3 per turn. They drop statuses and get a free haze off every so often, and they have a shield that massively reduces their damage taken, but the shield has 3-5 health and loses 1 health per hit taken. When you pop the shield their defense and special defense harshly falls. Sometimes they have multiple shield phases. When your team's pokemon faint they revive after a full turn being dead. But if the fight lasts 10 turns or your team has 4 faints you lose and can go again.
So online play isn't so bad, you have 4 people, and usually at least 2 of them have some idea of what they are doing and are trying to win, or at least are using the legendary that does bonus damage to gigantomax so that's something.
But if you try to do offline play for 5 stars you either have to massively overlevel them (and they are 60-70 generally), perfectly counter them or actually rely on the NPC teammates to do something. And they don't. There is a very small pool of trainers using the medium AI and like 75% of them are using really terrible movesets and pokemon. One of them uses Magikarp for Christ's sake. They just feed kills to the gigantomax and get you losses. The only redeeming thing is that most of the really terrible pokemon have Focus Sashes so it takes 2 normal attacks to kill them instead of 1. God help you if the enemy is using moves that hit multiple targets. There's also a lot of 2 turn attacks (solar beam, giga impact) and moves that don't take a shield HP off the shield when that's all that's important. Thanks for helping hands me when the pokemon is taking like 90% reduced damage Eevee. The AI should never have After You but Clefairy runs it anyway. They're so bad that I look forward to getting a Torkoal or Qwilfish on my team because at least they attack people and usually don't die to one neutral hit.
So the answer is to just go online right? I wish. Online works in an extremely dysfunctional fashion. And because at the best of times Nintendo's online is horrible and the Switch is janky I'm never really sure where to place blame. The parts Game Freak is absolutely responsible for are terrible though.
So the way it's intended to work is that hit X to go to the online menu, and then opt in to online. Then you'll get a bunch of updates from random people, and some of those updates (most will be mystery trades, or similar shit) will be requests for help in a raid battle, and some of those will be actually of interest to you, and some of those won't be full already and you'll sign up.
The problems are:
-Online doesn't work. Most of the time you will see people walking around the world (popping in 5 feet from you of course) and the game will say you're connected but you receive no updates. Other times it's fine. Probably a 90%/10% split. I suspect that the way it's set up is that there are actually two different online services and the only one anyone cares about is the jankier (but according to the game less important) of the two.
-The updates are mostly shit no one cares about. Like a rando winning their max raid battle or mystery trades. You can search through your updates for whatever you're looking for but why would you design the system so it spams you with shit you won't care about.
-You'd better know your Pokemon silhouettes and typing because that's the only way to ID whether the pokemon is one you're looking for. And you have to go through a (short) loading screen to get the typing.
-If you try to host one it's not clear whether you are actually broadcasting updates and no one is joining you because no one wants the pokemon you are fighting or whether you're not really online.
-The game doesn't always pull out old requests, so sometimes you just get informed that that Ditto you wanted to fight isn't available anymore.
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