There’s a lot of confusion going on right now with the difficulty of Gigantamax raids. Being in an area with limited players, I wanted to get a feel for them to see if it would be possible to organise a group to win one. So myself and one other fought it, knowing we wouldn’t beat of course, but what stood out to me the most in addition to the obvious too beefy HP stat was the targeted charge moves.

It’s very hard to negate damage dealt from the boss

As pointed out in this post (well worth the read!) here by u/Flyfunner the Dynamax and Gigantamax bosses have two attacks - one that hits all players, and another that hits one specific player but noticeably does twice the damage compared to a group attack. Unlike the attacks that hit all players, the targeted attacks will give you a warning and an opportunity to dodge via the yellow lines displayed above the Pokémon, indicating that it is about to get hit.

The issue is, it is very difficult to negate any of this damage because the reduced damage from dodging these attacks is scaled by how last minute you choose to dodge. If you dodge early to be safe then you will still get hit with most of that double damage attack and if you dodge too late then you will be hit with the full force of it. This leaves the player with a very small opportunity to negate any damage at all from the Gigantamax raid boss, both getting hit with unannounced attacks that damage everyone and also the double damage single attacks that have very small windows to dodge and more often than not, will OHK-O or two hit K-O your Pokémon regardless of level.

Gigantamax bosses deal way too much damage

It seems to me like the damage these t6 gigantamax bosses do with their charge attacks is very comparable to the damage we are used to with regular tier 5 raid bosses. This should not be the case in dynamax raids because we are at a huge disadvantage in that we cannot revive our party and we only have 3 Pokémon to use instead of 6. In theory max heal and guard should negate this problem, but because it takes time to reach your first dynamax you will often have already lost your first or even second Pokémon before getting to use any these moves.

Even if you can reach your dynamax to use max heal, at the maximum level of 3 this only heals 16% of max hp to all players per move which equates to just under 50% if you use it three times. I could see this being useful perhaps if you had two players per group of 4 dedicated solely to healing everyone to almost full every time, while the other two focus on damage but it would be very difficult to coordinate who gets placed into which group of 4. For a mostly mindless game about tapping and swiping this certainly seems like it requires a lot of coordination and brain power between organising player roles and being able to time your dodges…

But let’s say you were somehow able to organise everyone in the correct groups of 4 (and let’s not even mention the risk of some of the players in said groups not getting past the entry screen or being booted out before or during the raid). By doing this you’ve effectively halved your player count that is actually dealing noticeable damage to the boss which is a problem when considering the enrage timer. Not only that, but I’m not actually confident that full heals every dynamax turn would be enough to outpace the huge double damage dealt from the previously mentioned single target attacks that generally deal at least half HP to even level 50 Pokémon and these happen several times between each dynamax.

Half the number of players does not equal half the damage dealt to the boss

All of this gets so much worse if you’re trying to fight the raid boss with small numbers. I could be wrong about this, but to me it seemed like when the two of us fought the boss we were getting attacked much more frequently with the single hit double damage attacks than what I was seeing on early twitch streams with lobbies of 15-40. My theory is because there were only two of us fighting the raid, the boss only had two players to target for these powerful single target attacks which means we were essentially both getting hit more often than we would have otherwise been if there were four of us in that raid lobby.

So in a lobby of two players vs four players not only would the two be dealing half the damage as the four but they would also be taking close to twice the amount of damage in the same timeframe because of these powerful single hit attacks. If you can’t reliably dodge them in the tiny window then that’s too bad!

I’m not totally qualified to know how the single hit attack frequency would compare to a scenario with larger groups of maybe 20 vs 40 as haven’t experienced a raid with those numbers. But looking at the twitch streams it did seem like twice the number of players were generally able to deal a lot more than twice the damage.

Conclusion

In short, in order to fix gigantamax raids the boss HP and damage needs to be nerfed and especially the frequency of the single hit charge attacks. Presently it does not seem possible to beat these raids with a “minimum of 10 players” as suggested in the tutorial and in fact, those 10 players would be at well over twice the disadvantage as a group twice the size. This is why close to 30-40 people are currently needed to win.