Pokemon Go raids are destroying everyone and players are baffled

Upticks in reports of Pokemon Go’s raids spontaneously becoming more difficult overnight left players baffled over the cause.

Across multiple community subreddits, users reported struggling to best raid bosses they’d previously had no issue defeating. Gen 3 legendary Kyogre, which returned to PoGo’s raid rotation on September 3, was singled out, in particular, as being far more potent than before.

“Why is Kyogre suddenly 10 times harder!?”, claimed one now-deleted post, with more following suit, questioning, “Is it me, or are raids three times as difficult as yesterday?” and outright slamming the feature as being “in a horrible condition right now.”

On September 6, Niantic rolled out raid “improvements” to “increase stability, reduce latency, and provide the ability to expand on them in the future.” The developer stipulated that said adjustments could “affect the timing of some Pokemon moves”, and that it “may adjust them over time.”

Players attributed the freak appearance of supercharged raid ‘mons to Niantic’s changes, specifically citing how raid bosses now use Charged Attacks immediately and without cooldown as the core issue.

“They changed the energy gain from damage to 50% overnight and it is a big issue with a previous change that makes the boss instantly use a Charged Attack as soon as it has enough energy,” one Reddit user claimed.

“Niantic reverted the Raid boss energy regeneration to 0.5 from 0.02 seconds but because of the change to how the Raid boss uses its Charged Attacks (instantly instead of chance to) it now can spam them”, another suggested.

While the exact cause is unknown, these complaints are just the latest in a series of community frustrations aimed at Pokemon Go’s latest season, Max Out. Criticisms over the implementation of Dynamax and monetization have persisted, and it remains to be seen if any of the feedback will be addressed.