Jan/Feb 7* Event - Greninja (Poison Tera)

Turn 3: Shield at ~80% (why so early?!)
The buff clear + shield will generally come within 3-4 turns or a couple minutes in the fight.

Them coming up early is part of the challenge, and in fact, the fact the buff clear comes up very early is what allows the buff strats to work.
 
Adding on to everyone else saying this was pretty straightforward: beat it first-try with an AI trainer in the party and with me using my SpDef Umbreon. Greninja just doesn't have the damage output to really threaten KOs so you have all the time in the world to debuff it and set up for big damage. My teammate's Slowbro missed like 5 Stored Powers and we still won
 
Adding on to everyone else saying this was pretty straightforward: beat it first-try with an AI trainer in the party and with me using my SpDef Umbreon. Greninja just doesn't have the damage output to really threaten KOs so you have all the time in the world to debuff it and set up for big damage. My teammate's Slowbro missed like 5 Stored Powers and we still won
Ironically, I think 3 players + 1 AI is actually the optimal setup for multiplayer.
The AI will always Defensive Cheer turn 1, and combined with the fact that the AI death is completely irrelevant while they still do keep chipping at the boss, it makes the very early turns much safer while not really taking a whole lot from the party power
 
I had most success using Vaporeon or Toxapex so far.

Vaporeon is more sturdy than Slowbro in my experience, because Greninja cannot hit it super effectively with any move, and you also have Aqua Ring for additional healing. I rarely had problems surviving when I used Vaporeon, even when Greninja did crit several times.

Toxapex is pretty simply, you either use a cheer or spam Acid Spray. Since Greninja cannot boost its offenses, surviving is easy.
 
man this raid is actually surprisingly easy, you just pick the right mon and you insta win

used this build:
Clodsire @ Soft Sand
Ability: Water Absorb
Tera Type: Ground
EVs: 252 HP / 252 Atk / 4 SpD
Adamant Nature
IVs: 31 HP / 31 Atk / 26 Def / 26 SpA / 31 SpD / 19 Spe
- Yawn
- Earthquake
- Recover
- Curse

Yawn was basically never used in the raid attempt, I used Curse 3 times then the boss cleared them, started setting up again and got really confused why despite me being at +4 attack and defense after the stat nulling I was at -6 speed.

Then the boss activated its shield really early but it didn't matter because I was already at +4 attack and so Earthquakes hit hard. Surprisingly misses were not common on my end, it took me 4 Earthquakes or something before I got an unlucky miss. I Tera'd Ground after three Earthquakes to do even more damage. Soft Sand Tera Ground Earthquakes at +4 does go pretty hard lol

Eventually after an unlucky Night Slash crit [well ok two but the first one wasn't that significant because I just Recover'd it off] Clodsire dies but I've already done my part so the AI partners finish it off.

Rolled Corviknight/Staraptor/Gardevoir as the AI partners, which certainly helped too.
 
Got it on the second attempt with slowbro with some online randos. Another slowbro also doing the stored power thing, alongside a support Chansey (Eviolite, I assume) and stored power vaporeon.

The vapreon honestly didn't accomplish much, even with stored power. I think it might have thrown out a chilling water or two? But honestly everyone worked very smoothly together. People were ON POINT with heal cheers to get the bros through our set up. Chansey had both Life Dew and Heal Pulse to suit the occasion as well; this was in addition to Thunder Wave. paralysis was clutch!

The kill shot was great. Stored Power (after a few misses) broke the shield, then the follow up hit the same turn and annihilated the health bar. Caught mine in a Moon Ball
 
Also very nice is Support Clodsire

Clodsire @ Zoom Lens
Ability: Water Absorb
Tera Type: Ground
EVs: 252 HP / 252 SpD / 4 Def
Sassy Nature

- Amnesia
- Mud-Slap
- Acid Spray
- Helping Hand


You simply reduce Greninja's accuracy a few times by using Mud-Slap, and after it resets you use Amnesia one time and spam cheers / Acid Spray afterwards. Very easy.

Works great with Slowbro and Vaporeon in your team too.
 
When I play with premades we usually prefer to have only 1 or 2 Slowbros / Vaporeons, and the remaining spots go to supporters. Because Slowbro and Vaporeon are usually busy with boosting and have no time for healing. It is easier to use supporters for healing / debuffing.
 

DHR-107

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Jumped on with a levelled up Clodsire spamming Mud Slap and cleared a few of these. I feel this was the easiest of the three so far. I did get carried by some great Slowbro players who presumably liked the misses I was causing.


This did happen to me on the final run through. Would not recommend Dig Garchomp as your raid pick... I thought it was going to be a fail, but the Slowbro definitely rescued us there.
 

DougJustDoug

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DISCLAIMER: Unlike my typical posts, I am not presenting the Frosmoth moveset below as a suggested option for the Greninja raid or any other. This build didn’t work out as well as I hoped. I’m presenting it here so it might get your wheels turning on some different stuff perhaps you haven’t thought about, and it might inspire other interesting solutions in the future.

I love to tinker with different things, and I try to find non-obvious pokemon that are viable in raids. I experimented with this Frosmoth for the Greninja raid, because the theorymon looked interesting on paper. But in practice and it just didn’t work very well. I won’t call it a complete failure, because it wasn’t an outright liability to teams and it does have a small niche contribution that few other pokemon can do. But overall, this just wasn’t much of a help to teams, and I personally won’t continue to play it over other options. But hey, it was an interesting experiment, at least to me it was. You can draw your own conclusions.

I built this Frosmoth because I was frustrated with two things in the Greninja raid:

1) Although Double Team is not as bad as I feared it would be, it still sucks.
I’ve been part of too many losses where misses played too big of a role. Also, the current only reliable answer for Double Team is Clear Smog. But because Clear Smog clears ALL stat changes, it sucks hard if you have to wipe out all the debuffs the team has applied during the battle with all the Acid Sprays, Chilling Waters, Mud-Slaps, etc. For this reason, I typically only use Clear Smog at the beginning of the battle (after the Turn 0 DT) or after Greninja wipes all its negatives, if it has DT’ed again in the meantime. VERY occasionally, I will Clear Smog at the end of the battle, if Greg has piled up a lot of evasion and the big attackers are missing their attacks so much that it’s worth the tradeoff to remove all the debuffs, just to get that effing evasion out of the way.
I wanted to find a Defog user that could work. Defog only lowers evasion, so it’s perfect. Unfortunately, almost every pokemon that gets Defog is a flying type and is weak to Greninja’s Ice Beam and/or other attacks. Frosmoth is on the short list of pokemon that get Defog that isn’t weak to anything the frog does.

2) Durability for a long battle is a big thing against Greninja, and too often I find myself having to make a difficult item choice - Leftovers for incremental recovery or Covert Cloak to eliminate secondary effects.
Even on pokemon that have reliable recovery moves, they all really appreciate that steady drip of health that comes from Lefties after defensive boosts and offesive debuffs to Greninja. However, the non-Poison types all hate the frequent annoying Poisoning that comes from Gunk Shot, and everyone hates the infrequent but crippling Freezes that can come from Ice Beam. So Covert Cloak gives real peace of mind instead of teeth-clenching on every hit from half of Greninja’s attacking moveset. It’s a tough choice. Fortunately because of its nifty abilities, Frosmoth doesn’t have to make that choice — it gets the benefit of both!

So those were the two key theorymon factors that drew me to Frosmoth. The rest of the set was to attempt to build a pokemon that could be a good combination supporter and gang attacking helper.

:sv/frosmoth:
Frosmoth @ Leftovers
Ability: Shield Dust
Tera Type: Ice
EVs: 252 HP / 252 Def
Bold Nature
- Ice Beam
- Defog
- Snowscape
- Quiver Dance

So the thinking behind this moveset went something like this: Defog is a given, for reasons mentioned above. Shield Dust eliminates secondary effects so Frosmoth is free to run Leftovers and get healing throughout the battle. Although Frosmoth has only 60 base Defense, it’s Ice type, which gets a 50% boost to its Defense in Snow. So Snowscape is effectively a Defense boost move for Frosmoth to patch up its brittle defensive posture, which is also beefed up with a Bold nature and max Def EVs. And the Def boost from Snow is tasty because it can’t get wiped by the raid boss, and it isn’t ignored on Critical Hits. Verrrry nice. Quiver Dance is one of the best boosting moves in the game, and allows Frosmoth to boost special attack and special defense AND makes it outspeed Greninja after only one use. Since Tera Poison Greninja resists Frosmoth’s Bug stab, it uses Ice Beam as the attack of choice. And although it hits Greninja neutral, with Moth’s impressive 125 base SpAtk and after some QD boosts those Ice Beams are gonna starting hurting the ninja frog. And with Tera Type Ice, Frosmoth can freely Tera as soon as possible and get the Tera boost to Ice Beam without losing the defensive Snow boost granted to Ice-types.

Sounds pretty good on paper, right?
Here’s what I found out in reality…

After playing Frosmoth in several raids, I found out that Greninja likes to hit it with Gunk Shot A LOT. I’m talking like 75% of the time or more. Shield Dust gives Frosmoth immunity to all secondary effects, so it doesn’t fear poisoning from Gunk Shot, exactly as I theorymonned ahead of time. Unfortunately that’s pretty much the only theorymon that worked out as well as I expected when it came to handling physical attacks. The fact is that even with max HP max Def and the Snow boost, Frosmoth still takes a big chunk from Greninja’s Gunk Shot. It takes more than 25% usually, and on turn 1 (before it gets Snow up) and on crits, Moth takes more than 40% from Gunk. So very quickly I discovered that I was massively on my heels with this pokemon almost from the get go.

Because remember, one of the key reasons for Frosmoth in the first place is to Defog away those pesky Double Teams? Ok, play it forward how the beginning of every raid goes with Frosmoth — Turn 1 it eats 40% from Gunk Shot and throws up Snowscape. Oh, waitaminnit Doug, I thought you said you like to remove that T0 Double Team ASAP? Why don’t you Defog on Turn 1? Because delaying Snow to turn 2 means I eat two Gunk Shots at 40% apiece and sitting at or near red health before I have really done much at all. And if I get unlucky and Greg crits me with Gunk Shot on those non-Snow turns, I eat 60% and will be facing a sliver of health at best and a KO at worst. So very quickly I had to start compromising the advantages of using Frosmoth (not being able to Defog as quickly as I wanted) to make up for its shortcomings.

I tried lots of things to get around the problems with physical bulk, but the tradeoffs were too high. I tried running Reflect, and that was nice because it helped the entire team too. But it came at the cost of a moveslot which Frosmoth really can’t afford to lose. Get rid of Defog? No way, that’s basically the only unique thing about this pokemon for the Greninja raid. Get rid of Quiver Dance? No way, Ice Beams are chip damage without it and when Greninja does Hydro Pump (which is about 20% of the time) those Pumps hit HARDER than Gunk Shot because Frosmoth is all-in on Defense EVs, nothing on SpDefense. Get rid of Ice Beam? Haha, yeah right, boost up with Quiver Dance and then… Defog? ROFL
I also tried leveraging Frosmoth’s other ability to mitigate defensive problems. I burned an Ability Patch to give it Ice Body, so after the Snow went up, not only did it get a boost to Def, but it also gets incremental healing. Getting the equivalent of double Lefties is very nice, but guess what happened literally on the very first turn of the very first battle when I switched to Ice Body instead of Shield Dust? Yeah, you knew it — poisoned by Gunk Shot. FML

To try and increase team usefulness, I tried running Struggle Bug instead of Ice Beam, to lower Special Attack. But even though Struggle Bug is stab on Frosmoth and boosted by QD, it’s resisted by Poison Greninja and really isn’t an attack at all from a damage-dealing standpoint. It’s just kinda like, What’s the point? A boosting attacker that can only use a low-BP resisted attack? Thanks, but no thanks. Not saying it’s useless or anything, but it’s just not at all what this pokemon was hoped to be.

The nail in the coffin for me and this Frosmoth was when I found out something that I KNEW, but for some reason completely forgot when theorymonning. All the time I was thinking of Defog as a better move for this raid than Clear Smog, so Clear Smog was on my mind a lot, too much in fact. Because it made me completely forget that Defog is a STATUS MOVE not an attack like Clear Smog, so you can’t Defog through the raid boss shield. Like I said, I knew this, but was just stupid and forgot about it. Forgot it until the first time I smugly clicked Defog after Greninja DT’ed while it had the shield up. And I cringed as I realized what a noob I looked like to the randos on my team. I can hear it now:
“Hey guys, get this, not only does some dumbass rando bring a friggin Frosmoth into our Greninja raid. But after doing worthless crap like setting up Snow, then they proceed to epic fail attempting to Defog at the boss shield Lol!”

Oh, the humiliation…

So yeah, even though there is some nice stuff on paper with Frosmoth, I just couldn’t get it to work anywhere near as well as I thought it might. In the end, it was able to survive mostly, with the help of teams that typically are spamming Heal cheers anyway. And it does typically Defog away the first DT before the shield goes up. But it spends a lot more time QD boosting, Heal cheering, and resetting Snow than it does attacking unfortunately, so it had a hard time getting to where it can Tera or help bring the shield down. But if it’s on a decent team of attackers that bring down the Shield, there is some nifty utility in Frosmoth that it can Defog for the endgame attacks and allow the team to confidently dogpile Greninja and win the raid. It’s a useful niche, but it’s awfully small. Just not at all worth it, considering how many other utility pokemon out there that can do more and do it more reliably.

Sorry little Ice Bug — I tried.
 
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Heh, I feel sorry for you, considering all the effort that went into it.
I quickly realized the whole Defog problem right away sadly, as originally i was theorizing Corvinight for similar purpose then realized "wait a minute, I can't even do it anyway, what's the point".
Incidentally, Evasion is actually the only thing you can't really affect through shield. Well, Haze exists, but I don't think I need to go on why that idea died within my first attempt.

However, since you're looking for HEAT stuff for when the raid comes back, I'll throw you my weird Lucario set that I came up with after seeing someone with bigger brain than me use something similar, and which I refined to help a friend beat the raid with Armarouge (why? Because we were bored. And yes, it worked, it was pain but we did beat it like 5-6 times with that Armarouge+Amoongus+Lucario+Vaporeon).

:lucario: Lucario @ Leftovers
Ability: Justified
Tera Type: Steel (not that I ever clicked this)
EVs: 252 HP / 252 SpDef (You could also just invest speed if you fancy outspeeding)
Calm Nature
- Calm Mind
- Sunny Day
- Life Dew
- Heal Pulse

Have you ever wanted to do absolutely 0 damage but be a budget Blissey?
The thing plays pretty simple, cast Sunny Day turn 1, Life Dew until buff clear, then couple Calm Mind and alternate Life Dew and keeping up Sunny Day.
Heal Pulse is there in case one person takes a BIG CHONK and you don't want to invest the healing cheer (or don't have it). In my case, it mostly was for when Armarouge decided to eat a Night Slash or Hydro Pump crit. Besides, Heal cheers are better used for when YOU take a crit, as while it doesn't oneshot, it still hurts pretty badly if Sun is not up.
I did notice that sun does change the AI a bit, but it isnt very consistent, es it'd keep alternating Night Slash and Hydro Pump on Armarouge, but it'd still keep using Hydro Pump on me, however when I ran into this set on someone else, I was on Qwil (which most notably gets 99% Hydro Pumps) and ended up swapping to Night Slash.


Also still if you want some Heat, the guy with Amoongus had Black Sludge, mostly spdef investment, Pollen Puff / Stun Spore / Clear Smog / Acid Spray. Originally had Spore but I suggested to swap to Paralysis since that actually does something instead of just denying a couple attacks.
Interestingly, the AI would alternate Gunk Shot and Ice Beam on the shroom,
 

Chou Toshio

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So I went ahead and built/tested the Gastrodon

423-e.png

@ Covert Cloak
Adamant 252 HP / 56 ATK / 200 DEF (I eye-balled it without calc'ing, feel free to propose better!)
Tera Type: Water (NOT Ground, reasons below)
-Curse
-Clear Smog
-Recover
-Earthquake

Using this set, I have been really happy with it though it's certainly not a silver bullet and I want to share the strengths/weaknesses and other things I've learned using it.

Record (subtracting about ~4 practice rounds where I lost while figuring out how to play this the most optimally in actual battle):
In Online Raids: 6/6
In Solo Raids: 6/8

The Strengths of the Set:

Greninja basically can't break this at all. It's an immovable fortress in both online and solo. If there was unlimited time, Gastrodon would inevitably win no matter what (the challenge is getting it to win in time..). Compared to Vaporeon or Slowbro, it feels extremely reliable because you're basically never in a situation without answers to hax, never praying to hit or not get crit. You always are at enough health to priority cheer or recover yourself back in, you're always able to clear double teams, you're never worried about Freeze or Poison. Also relevant, you're bringing Terastelize online very, very early, and not worrying about even hitting Greninja to get the Tera charges you need to break shield. Once you get used to using it, your next best play is usually pretty clear, and you're progressing without break. Also as a note that other Gastrodon players probably already know, Greninja uses all 4 of its attacks against Gastrodon (including Hydro Pump thankfully!), so you must be ready for all 4, but also means you get really free turns every time it Pumps or even Gunk Shots.

You have answers for everything Greninja has-- typing/bulk boosting to make yourself invincible, enough so that you can absorb Crits pretty comfortably, clear smog for double team, immunity to freeze/poison, and a way to boost your power + super effective stab--> It's kind of a "bring a whole raid team in one mon" with the only issue being enough time to do it all.

Online, Gastrodon feels almost invincible with reasonable partners. Because I thought this up for solo raids post event, I thought it would be a Jack of all trades, king of none, and be sub-optimal for Team Raids, but turns out the flexibility means it does any job well enough to build a winning team with most common teammates. Depending on what others load up, I can play this full support or full sweeper, or just contribute to both.
With 3 Bro/Vaporeon: Sure this Gastrodon is not a perfect support missing out on things like Chilling Water, Thunder Wave, Intimidate, Acid Spray other supporters have-- but loaded up with 3 Stored Power sweepers, it does a good enough job of support with smartly prioritizing Defensive/Health cheers to bring the Bros online, and then clearing double teams to make sure they hit their mark and bring Greninja down in time.
With only 1 Bro/Vaporeon, 2 other supporters: This is super easy to win, and even with just 1 Stored Power user Gastrodon bring enough muscle, aggression, chip damage to raise the overall team's offensive ability to easily bring Ninja down. Feels impossible to lose this.
With 3 support mons: Really, really rare... people usually biased to bringing bros because of leftover mons from Cinderace Raid, but I did get 1 raid of the 6 where I was teamed up with Clodsire, Miraidon, and Qwilfish. It wasn't ideal, it was a bigger struggle than any of my other 5 raids, but the team saw Gastrodon Cursing and they forewent on Acid Spraying to instead Offensive Cheer and Helping Hand to get Gastrodon boosted until it snow-balled and killed Greninja.

Solo Raid, the issue is always time. Gastrodon really needs to get to +5 or +6 to finish off Greninja, and ideally with an offensive cheer on top of it. Fortunately, because of Intimidates/Defensive cheer by the NPCs, Gastrodon comes online easily and as mentioned above, is always making progress start to finish. Gastrodon grabs chip, powers up, and eventually brings Greninja down without falter. Its offensive capability is the major issue, but overall it still feels to me more reliable than Vaporeon/Bro, it'd take more testing to see if that actually pans out in data.

The Weaknesses of the Set:
Power in Solo Raids. Mentioned a few times but Gastrodon's missing on power even Terrastelized at +4, really want to get to +5 or +6 when solo raiding.
I also tried using Tera Ground (saving up shards all last week!) and that DEFINITELY solves the power issue. The only problem is that Ice Beam stings waaayy too hard post-Tera. Especially when Greninja starts double-attacking late game-- getting hit by 2 Ice Beams without time to answer and the very real chance one of them Crits... note: Tera Water does remove your Gunk Shot resistance, but between your natural bulk, +5 defense/other modifiers in play, and saved up cheers because of how self-reliant Gastrodon is, late Game Gunk Shot isn't really a threat.
With the Ice Beam Tera Ground Gastrodon felt too unreliable to me, playing kind of akin to Bro or Vaporeon where you have enough power that you feel you can get it pushed through, but you're squeezing your skirt that you hope you don't get crit. At least you have the option of Clear Smog'ing over those mons, but when you're having Ice Beams raining down as the clock ticks, the choice to take a turn Clear Smoging is tough.
Maybe someone can find an EV spread with enough Special Bulk to ameliorate these issue, but it does come at the cost of something. I'd say that the current spread feels so reliable in taking hits that maybe a bit of that physical bulk could be swapped for Power or Special bulk.
Finally, in solo raids a real annoyance is having to soft reset if you ever get Arboliva. Arboliva is always getting hit and you play in a constant state of Grassy Terrain up, but that basically makes it impossible for Gastrodon to win with Earthquake. Overall though, found re-setting the raid for a non-Arboliva team to be not that bad.

How to Use:
Turn 1: Curse
Turn 2: Clear Smog (Tera charge 1)
Turn 3+: Earthquake (Grab chip, Tera charge 2+) Note: In both solo and team raid, you're always going to be fine defensively just at +1 after considering Intimidates/Chilling Waters/Defense boosts others will be using so no point in boosting past +1 until after the shield goes up.
(After Boosts Get Clears)
Curse once, then if Shield has not gone up yet somehow, keep Earthquaking for chip/tera boosts. Going straight for Curse Stacking works too.
(Shield goes up)
Curse until you get to +5 or +6, using Recover or Heal Cheer smartly to stay in the game.
Don't Terastelize until you're about to start attacking to keep your Gunk Shot resistance, though I've never been seriously hurt by Gunk Shot even after Tera.
Power boost with Cheer
Then Terastelize and start Earthquaking for the win.
Use Clear Smog only when there are 2+ Double Teams stacked. Trying to clear every +1 evasion is impossible from my experience.

Conclusion: This Gastrodon is an awesome general use set for folks without friends to organize with. It pairs up surprisingly well with most meta teams even if attacking on the physical side instead of special for reliable online raid wins, and is a notable option for solo raids. Please give it a try!
 
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Chou Toshio

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Heh, I feel sorry for you, considering all the effort that went into it.
I quickly realized the whole Defog problem right away sadly, as originally i was theorizing Corvinight for similar purpose then realized "wait a minute, I can't even do it anyway, what's the point".
Incidentally, Evasion is actually the only thing you can't really affect through shield. Well, Haze exists, but I don't think I need to go on why that idea died within my first attempt.

However, since you're looking for HEAT stuff for when the raid comes back, I'll throw you my weird Lucario set that I came up with after seeing someone with bigger brain than me use something similar, and which I refined to help a friend beat the raid with Armarouge (why? Because we were bored. And yes, it worked, it was pain but we did beat it like 5-6 times with that Armarouge+Amoongus+Lucario+Vaporeon).

:lucario: Lucario @ Leftovers
Ability: Justified
Tera Type: Steel (not that I ever clicked this)
EVs: 252 HP / 252 SpDef (You could also just invest speed if you fancy outspeeding)
Calm Nature
- Calm Mind
- Sunny Day
- Life Dew
- Heal Pulse

Have you ever wanted to do absolutely 0 damage but be a budget Blissey?
The thing plays pretty simple, cast Sunny Day turn 1, Life Dew until buff clear, then couple Calm Mind and alternate Life Dew and keeping up Sunny Day.
Heal Pulse is there in case one person takes a BIG CHONK and you don't want to invest the healing cheer (or don't have it). In my case, it mostly was for when Armarouge decided to eat a Night Slash or Hydro Pump crit. Besides, Heal cheers are better used for when YOU take a crit, as while it doesn't oneshot, it still hurts pretty badly if Sun is not up.
I did notice that sun does change the AI a bit, but it isnt very consistent, es it'd keep alternating Night Slash and Hydro Pump on Armarouge, but it'd still keep using Hydro Pump on me, however when I ran into this set on someone else, I was on Qwil (which most notably gets 99% Hydro Pumps) and ended up swapping to Night Slash.


Also still if you want some Heat, the guy with Amoongus had Black Sludge, mostly spdef investment, Pollen Puff / Stun Spore / Clear Smog / Acid Spray. Originally had Spore but I suggested to swap to Paralysis since that actually does something instead of just denying a couple attacks.
Interestingly, the AI would alternate Gunk Shot and Ice Beam on the shroom,
Thanks for the write-up Doug! I know how it painful it can be when what looks like a really great theorymon that you poured into goes wrong-- your passion comes through! Froslass is one of those mons that does stick out in interest when going through relevant moves/abilities/typing for this raid, but I didn't realize how close it was to being great until you laid it out! Shield Dust + Snow defensive Boost sounds sick-- maybe even Blizzard > Ice Beam since turns out it NEEDS snow up (though that wouldn't fix the defensive issues you mentioned above) and I can't imagine you getting enough turns to attack where the PP becomes an issue. Too bad it doesn't get Stored Power... Or heck, even if it had like 90 base HP instead of 70 your setup would probably work out.

Even though this one didn't work out, it's creative thinking like this that will make future raids easier for us all!
 
Late but here is what the Japanese SV news has to say for official tips on fighting Greninja.
https://sv-news.pokemon.co.jp/ja/page/29.html
google translate said:
The strongest Greninja remembers the techniques "Gunk Shot", "Hydro Pump", "Ice Beam" and "Night Slash" .
Because it unleashes various types of moves, it is a formidable enemy that can easily be at a disadvantage depending on the type of Pokémon you challenge.

Also, as soon as the battle begins, he will attack the field with "Toxic Spikes" and then increase his own evasion rate with "Double Team".
After that , the ability changes on the player's side will be reversed at an early stage, so be aware that actions that increase the abilities of allies at the beginning are likely to be wasted.
As you fight, you will perform "Double Team" and it will be difficult to hit the technique.

Let's know the advantageous type!
The strongest Greninja is the Poison Tera type.
When attacking Poison-type Pokémon, the effects are doubled for the Ground-type and Psychic-type moves, but the Ground-type Pokémon will receive outstanding damage with the moves Hydro Pump and Ice Beam, and Psychic-type Pokemon will receive outstanding damage with the technique "Night Slash" .

Terastal and type change!
It is also effective to change the type of Pokemon by making a tera. It may be a good idea to terastallize to a steel type that is less likely
to receive damage that is extremely effective and that does not receive damage from poison type moves.

Control your evasion rate and hit rate!
The strongest Greninja will perform "Double Team" many times to increase its own evasion rate.
Since the ability "Keen Eye" can ignore the evasion rate raised by the opponent , no matter how many times the strongest Greninja raises the evasion rate by "Double Team", the hit rate of this move will not change.
In addition, the technique "Defog" can lower the opponent's evasion rate .
If you have a Pokemon that has the "Keen Eye" characteristic or a Pokemon that learns the "Defog" move, you may want to choose them as partners to challenge.
The unique suggestion here is using Keen Eye to ignore the evasion boosts, though most mons with this get hit super effectively by Greninja in some way except Skuntank, Pelipper, and Sableye, none of which lean very offensively. Of those choices I guess you could run a consistent support Skuntank if you have one with HA since it gets Haze, Acid Spray, Snarl, Helping Hand, Sunny Day, Screech, and Nasty Plot.
 
Of those choices I guess you could run a consistent support Skuntank if you have one with HA since it gets Haze, Acid Spray, Snarl, Helping Hand, Sunny Day, Screech, and Nasty Plot.
...then again, if you're running a support set, then you don't really care for the evasion boosts anyway.

I don't quite like that they keep suggesting to look at your Tera type for these raids.
Realistically speaking... the Tera Type has been irrelevant so far for all 3 raids since most of the time you don't even get to Tera in first place, or if you do, at the very last turn.
 

DougJustDoug

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So the Greninja raid rerun has started again! After playing it a lot last night and this morning US time, it seems there are a lot more players with pokemon and strategies ready for this raid. By far the most popular mons I am seeing are Slowbro and Vaporeon, which is to be expected because they are the best offensive tools for this raid. I've seen a few offensive Espathra as well, but not too many. In terms of support mons, Clodsire and Gastrodon seem most common, with a few Qwilfish in there too.

I've done two or three raids with Lucarios on the team, and the teams all won, but I wasn't paying a lot of attention to what strategy they were following. I assume they were like the Lukes already mentioned in this thread earlier. Whatever the case, the Lukes didn't die and the teams seemed to win, not sure how much they helped in that regard or not.

Something that I still see in these Greninja raids is a low tolerance for bad pokemon. Because raids using Stored Power hitters require a long time to setup, even one bad pokemon fainting over and over will lose the raid because the rest of the team just can't clear it fast enough to make up for the idiot on the team. I don't join many raids that have what appear to be bad pokemon on them, but I have joined a few, just hoping that maybe I will be surprised by someone that has found something new that works. Sadly, my hopes have yet to be rewarded.

For example, I was in the lobby of a rando raid with two good pokemon locked in. I was in third position with Gastrodon. The fourth team member seemed to be going in with Slowbro, so I locked in. Then the fourth player switched to Garchomp for some weird reason. I was already locked in, so there was nothing I could do at that point. But I thought to myself, "Hmmm, this person obviously knows *something* about this raid, because they started with Bro... maybe they know something about Garchomp that I don't...." I know, I know, kinda crazy to believe Garchomp has any hope against a 7* raid boss known to be running Ice Beam... but, like I said, I was already locked in. And if you would have told me a while back that Lucario would be able to be work in this raid versus Hydro Pump, I would have laughed. So I was hoping I might learn something new about Chomp.

Nope.
Didn't learn a damn thing.

Garchomp died literally every turn of the battle they were there. The only time they weren't dying was when they were already fainted, burning our timer waiting to return to get Ice Beamed yet again by the mighty frog ninja. So yeah, we lost that one even though the other three of us were doing everything possible to get through it.

I've lost other raids with what look like good pokemon, that I can only assume have terrible movesets or are underleveled or something. Like a Slowbro that fainted three times in a raid that we lost. I've had my own Bro get fainted sometimes too, due to consecutive Slash crits, so I understand bad luck might be the culprit at any time. But this raid just doesn't go well if there are bad mons on the field, so I'm fairly selective about the raids I lock into and join.

When I do join raids with the aforemention good mons (Bro, Zappy, Espathra, Clod, Qfish, etc) my current favorite pokemon to run that seems to help the team win most often is this Gastrodon:

:sv/gastrodon:
Gastrodon @ Covert Cloak
Ability: Storm Drain
EVs: 252 HP / 192 Def / 64 SpDef
Bold Nature
- Mud-Slap
- Chilling Water
- Recover
- Clear Smog

I tweaked the Gastrodon I posted earlier, based on the comments by Worldie about the effectiveness of Mud-Slap against Greninja. I dumped Earth Power and the offensive build stuff in favor of a pure support snail. There are lots of builds for Gastrodon that seem to be working in this raid, as posted earlier in this thread (including my earlier post). But I am posting this here, just to emphasize how awesome the combo of Mud-Slap and Clear Smog are for team effectiveness in this raid.

EVERYONE on the team appreciates the miss-hax caused by Mud-Slap. As Worldie posted earlier, since Greninja's two biggest moves are inaccurate to begin with, lowering the frog's aim is just fantastic for the team. In most battles, after a few Slaps, I notice the team becomes almost unhittable, and the other offensive mons stop having to heal and can focus solely on stat-boosting to get those Stored Powers up into nuke range. It's awesome.

And then towards the end of the battle, typically right after the shield drops, I've noticed Greninja likes to clear all negative effects and then Double Team. I've even seen it DOUBLE Double Team right after the shield drops. In some battles, even though we have multiple Stored Power juggernauts boosted up and ready to win -- evasion causes every SP to miss and we lost. Not with this Gastrodon. Even after the dreaded double-double team, one little Clear Smog wipes it all away and the hapless Greninja is bombed into oblivion for an easy win. It's such a stress-free ending to what could otherwise be a nailbiter. I love it and highly recommend it!
 
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Not going to lie.. the few times I have won Greninja raids with... questionable choices (including a Garchomp) was when I was on Clod or Gastro.
Most likely we literally just got lucky with accuracy drops.

And I mean... the boss plays with Evasion hax, it is only fair that we fight back with basically the same :zonger:
 
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