Niantic confirms Raid attack timing changes were intentional, forces a whole new PvE meta

We recently posted about a suit of changes that were silently introduced for Raids, but there was no official confirmation about that until yesterday. Despite our best efforts to get more details from Niantic earlier, the only thing we got was this acknowledgment that the changes are intentional:

Trainers, we have launched improvements to Raid Battles to increase stability, reduce latency, and provide the ability to expand them in the future. This may affect the timing of some Pokémon moves. We are monitoring these changes and your feedback and may adjust them over time.

— Niantic Support (@NianticHelp) September 5, 2024

With the recent Dynamax and Galar release events, we assume that most of our readers have limited knowledge about the Raid changes, so let’s go through them together:

• Raid Battles now operate based on a 0.5 second cycle
• Duration of all moves has been rounded up or rounded down to the closest multiple of 0.5 seconds. Some moves are faster, some are slower, some are unchanged
• This has had massive effect on best moves, best counters, and best Raid Attackers of every type

This affects both fast and charge moves. Here is a few examples:

• Sucker Punch (0.7 sec → 0.5 sec)
• Fury Cutter (0.4 sec → 0.5 sec)
• Poison Jab (0.8 sec → 1.0 sec)
• Stone Edge (2.3 sec → 2.5 sec)
• Bug Buzz (3.7 sec → 3.5 sec)

TogeTips has a good video on the change which includes a bit more info:

Here’s how to find the new Best Attackers in Pokémon GO

The effects of this change are massive, and luckily our Pokémon GO Database already supports this, so you should be able to get up to date fast. However, there are so many instances where Pokémon who were previously mid tier are now top tier, so you might want to evaluate your Raid teams against the new mechanics.

In order to do so, please check our Best of Type charts, which should provide a quick overview of the new best attackers:

Early player base reactions and our take

As one might expect, the reactions from the player base are beyond salty. From Trainers who are angry for not having any advance notice on this change (completely warranted criticism IMHO), to others who are pointing out that Raids are currently suffering from other issues like phantom damage and the inability to dodge, we are still struggling to find any positive commentary online.

The bad stuff

From our end, we do agree with the criticism, but there is a silver lining to this change:

• Niantic did a terrible job at communicating this change, by not communicating it at all
• This was a perfect opportunity to do a developer journal and explain the design and balancing process behind this change
• The arbitrary rounding up and down of move durations, while still having those same moves have different duration in the Game Master, is incredibly confusing. We now have 3 different move durations – the one in GM (which is not used anywhere), the one used in Raids, and the one used in Trainer Battles
• The lack of any official blog post on this is ghastly at best

The okay stuff

With that being said, let’s be honest for a second – the Raids were in a dire need of a change, and this rebalance has introduced some new faces to the top tiers. Magnezone, Zarude, Meowscarada, Gengar: it’s nice to see these Pokémon in Raids, but was it really that difficulty to communicate this change in any way?

This is very unprofessional from Niantic’s end, especially since the change retroactively affects Pokémon that we spent years on building up and powering up. Not cool Niantic, not cool at all.

We give this change a 7/10 for results, but 1/10 for execution.