Pokemon Tera Raid guide for absolute newbies (tera raids 1 - 3 star and 4 star raid guide)

So, tera raids are a whole thing. You can tera raid a pokemon and get pokemon with interesting tera types. Normal pokemon can have tera types but they tend to be one of the one or two types they normally are. And while there are some wild tera pokemon loose on the over world that have distinctly different types to those, your best avenue of getting a pokemon with a different tera type is through two avenues.

Avenue one is using tera shards to change a pokemon's type (something that I want to say can be done mid to late game), or get a pokemon from a tera raid (which you can do as soon as you get a tera orb).

It's not terribly difficult to do tera raids when talking about raids at levels 1-3. 4 and above you start hitting obstacles and stars becoming more end-game in nature.

The first thing is that you should look into and understand how tera raids work from a technical standpoint with regards to their leveling and mechanics. This chart from Bulbapedia is a good place to start, and it wouldn't hurt to at least skim the page on it

As you can see, depending on your level, raids up to 2 level are reasonably doable throughout the game's story. Keep these levels in mind when doing raids, as the pokemon in the raids will be at these stated levels, and as such they will have moves that they would naturally have at those levels.

It absolutely should also be noted that encounter rates and things for tera raids is scaled to progress. You won't be seeing five star raids right off the bat, or at least not naturally without having to do multiplayer lobbies and the like.

Both of these tables are essentially copied from the Bulbapedia tera raid page, and as noted earlier, you should definitely give it a read.

Another thing that's super helpful when starting these raids is the pokemon type calculators at pkmn.help.

What I recommend when starting out depending on your level is to put in on offense the type of your strongest pokemon and see what it deals the most damage to. For example, if you have a krookodile, ground / dark deals 2x damage to poison, rock, ghost, steel, fire, electric and psychic types.

If it were a Yanmega, bug / flying type deals 2x to fighting, bug, grass, psychic, and dark.

The other thing to consider about tera raids is that they're effectively mono-type pokemon. If it's a fire tera raid, the pokemon you're against is functionally just a single type pokemon. Granted a more powerful than normal pokemon but it's still a mono type.

You can work around this.

As a result, provided you've got a strong pokemon for it, levels one through three can be solo'd with NPC team mates easily enough.

The big difficulty jumps that you'll have to work around (and as the game progresses you should be able to work around them), are at levels 3 and 4.

3 star raids unlock once you get half of your gym badges, and this is where it really starts becoming important to consider tera types given that this is also about the time pokemon will begin to throw up Tera shields to stall out time. You can in theory get through those with regular attacks but it's at a much reduced rate compared to terastallized attacks.

4 star raids is the next big jump where at that point you should have all your gym badges and the game is expecting you to really understand at least the basic battle matchup mechanics and the pool of pokemon for this starts getting both more enticing for catching tera pokemon and challenging for fighting them.

The main reason this is just for raids 1 - 4 is because while being based on game progression, the difficulty jumps between each raid are rough but fair.

they are jumps between 1 - 4, and then a huge spike at 5 star raids, with each level after that being a larger spike due to assumed knowledge of mechanics.

Once you hit five star and above, is when you gotta consider end-game guides or multiplayer raiding. There are guides out there on youtube for this, and I'd sooner recommend that since I don't have enough experience at or above 5 star raids to make a succinct guide for it. It is what I'd call the first major difficulty spike for raiding and you gotta be around endgame / post endgame to do these well.

I certainly hope this will be easy enough for absolute beginners or those who want to dip their toes into raiding without going into higher end raids.

The three big takeaways for raiding at lower levels are

1. Know the level benchmarks for the tera raid pokemon (12, 20, 35, and 45 for raid levels one through four, 75, 90, and 100 for five star and above)
2. Tera raids are functionally mono-type pokemon, use this to your advantage. Some of the raid pokemon will be technically dual types and have a variety of moves, but they are functionally mono-type pokemon
3. Try to pick and choose tera raids based on what your strongest pokemon are strong against.

The best part is that you can catch pokemon from the tera raids and this is a decent way of getting pokemon with interesting or good tera potential. At the very least it is much cheaper than trying to go through changing tera types with tera shards. Granted, Scarlet and Violet make this much easier than other games to get optimal pokemon, but there are in fact quicker ways to go about this. It's also a great way to fill out pokedex without trading, and you can find a surprising amount of viable pokemon this way.

And remember, everything up to four stars is generally intended for handling before hitting credits. Five star raids only start appearing once you hit end credits. At that point you really are expected to know what you're doing if you've completed the main game story of pokemon.

Once you hit five stars and above, that's when it's really time to start hitting the books and the videos about specific and general raid builds, what to look out for, etc but there will usually be an expectation of knowledge and understanding given it's absolutely tied to game progress.

By that point, if you get a five star tera raid pokemon, that can usually handle a four star tera raid pokemon no problem, but you will start really needing to put work and effort into it if you're aiming for five stars and above, as not everyone is willing to carry team mates who don't contribute well, and depending on the raid it might not go well with the NPC's unless you're making specific build pokemon that can stand on their own.

I do have a write up for anything above five if you wanna look at that, but it is both very reading heavy as far as reccomended readings go, and assumes a decent amount of knowledge about the game if you're really looking into end-game content.