This raid was a lot harder than I thought it would be after reading other commenters in this thread. From early comments, I thought I could just bring in a bog-standard Stored Power mon, like Slowbro or Armarouge, and cruise this raid without any planning. The reality for me was that Slowbro got its ass kicked by Boomburst and even after multiple movesets and strategies, I was still failing to get anything close to what I call a clean solo win. Same thing for Armarouge. So I realized I was going to have to make something specific for this raid, or I would have to cheese it, and not get a clean solo win.
Keep in mind, my definition of a “clean win” is that I don’t faint and that I don’t require specific NPC’s to clear the raid if I get the normal luck when it comes to crits and other luck factors. I’m not saying fainting or resetting for NPC’s is a bad thing. I just don’t feel like I’m really “solving the raid” if I do that. And for raids that don’t involve a rare pokemon or legend or something, there’s really no reason for me to even do the raid if I all I want to do is catch the mon. I can get a kajillion Kommo-o pretty easily ingame, so beating this raid any way possible, just to have yet another Kommo-o in my box is not interesting at all to me. So, I have this self-imposed standard for a clean win that I try to achieve. Sometimes I can achieve it, sometimes I can’t. But for me, the joy is in trying to find one or more solutions, whether I come up with them myself or use something I find posted by others.
I suspected I might be able to make a Slowbro or similar work against Kommo-o, if I kept tweaking the set or strategy or both. But I started thinking in other directions, since Stored Power nukes are pretty well-explored territory when it comes to 7-star raid tech.
After playing around with a few things, below is what I ended up using and it worked very reliably for me. I’ll just preface this by saying I generally try to avoid using legendaries to solve raids, because I prefer the challenge of using something that is more generally available, something I can catch and breed or whatever. But depending on the raid (like this one) I’ll use a legend, I just won’t feel great about it. So, yeah, I’m admitting a bit of cheese already.
In general, I loved the idea of using Skill Swap on something to take special hits off the table, allowing me to concentrate solely on dealing with physical moves. But with other mons I tried in this raid, even using Skill Swap was not good enough, because eating that big +1 Boomburst on the first turn is just a dealbreaker, as it puts you on your heels before you even get going. So I started looking for something fast enough to Skill Swap before Kommo-o moves, that also can deal with the physical hits soon to come thereafter. It’s a short list of mons that fit that bill - fast, and a Skill Swapper, and can handle a big physical attacker, etc etc etc lol. And as reluctant as I am to use box-cover legends, I just kept coming back to this when searching for various factors I wanted in a solution. So with that said, here’s the set:
Mewtwo @ Shell Bell
Tera Type: Psychic
Ability: Unnerve
Timid Nature
EVs: 252 HP / 252 SpAtk
- Psystrike
- Chilling Water
- Skill Swap
- Nasty Plot
The crux of this set is that Mewtwo is faster than +1 speed Kommo-o from the jump. It would probably be more efficient to go Modest with 56 Speed EVs to get to 310 speed (+1 Kommo-o is 309) but I didn’t want to garbage up the EVs on my only Mewtwo if I could avoid it (yet another reason I hate using legends on raids). So I just used a Timid Mint (putting me at overkill 325 speed) which was easy to do and worked just fine anyway.
Since Mewtwo can Skill Swap before Kommo-o moves, it is immune to that first turn Boomburst, and so Mewtwo starts out the battle at full health while everything else was around 50% or less usually after that first bomb landed.
Then on turn 2, Mewtwo can do Chilling Water before Kommo-o moves, putting it back to +0 Attack, assuming no Intimidator NPCs on the team. If Intimidate is on your team, this raid is easier, but it is not required. Same goes for healing NPCs, very nice to have but not required. If you have both Intimidate and healing, this raid is a cakewalk. I haven’t faced a raid without at least one NPC neutral to Close Combat, and I think it *might* be a requirement to get Kommo’s defenses lowered, but I’m not sure.
Anyway after those first two set-in-stone moves, the general playbook for Mewtwo is to keep Chilling Water as much as you can and going Tera as soon as it is available. Depending on crits and NPCs and health needs, you might have to do a Heal Cheer before Tera. After Tera, you can do Psystrike for health if you need it. Against Kommo’s lowered defense, the Shell Bell recovery is a lot, even before Nasty Plotting.
After the player stat reset, I setup to +6 with Nasty Plot and then it’s just a few Psystrikes doing massive chunks of damage to victory.
I chose Psystrike instead of Psychic on the thinking that with scripted Clanging Scales in play, that Kommo’s Defense would be lowered more than SpDef, therefore a better defensive stat target. But I didn’t run the calcs. It may be that Psychic hitting Kommo’s lower base stat SpDef (which is even lower due to Naughty, and could be further lowered by Psychic SpDef drops) on those turns prior to the Clangs yields better overall DPS than Psystrike. But Psystrike is what I used and it worked great. Also, it’s Mewtwo’s signature move, so it’s way cooler than lame old TM Psychic or anything else IMO ;-)
