Make boss/raid abilities more documented when releasing them

[Raichuforyou]

I've raised this criticism before going back to Halloween and Anniversary events, but I think the amount of random stuff that bosses/raid mons have been doing has been turning into a huge undocumented mess, and has been resulting in a huge lack of respect for player's time, and making the content or rewards for the associated events less accessible. Let me elaborate a bit more.

When going through the raid battles for the first time, there's been some random abilities that especially aren't apparent upon playing against these mons compared to vanilla mons. How am I supposed to know that Slaking has a group paralysis effect under 50%? How am I supposed to know that these mons eventually shrug off status effects, flinches, stat drops, etc? Can I transform into them? How is Torment supposed to work? Can I use imprison? Can use Shedninja, or count on some BS ability nullifying Wonder Guard?

The answer of course to all of this is to try the strategy, lose, then try out another one to find out that the boss isn't subject to a niche move interaction. I'd argue this isn't fun at all, and where a big lack of respect for player's time happens, and dissuades players from trying out certain kinds of content entirely. This is especially a larger problem with Raids, where you have 3 other real players working with you who absolutely could get mad that you're trying to "experiment with strategies" at the moment.

I get it that gimmic strats are trying to be avoided by creating a bunch of these special interactions/nullified moves, but I think the only thing that has been happening as a result of it is a very limited/uncreative way to approach the bosses, and just creating tedious difficulty.

There are frankly amazing guides like this that the community has invested a bunch of time into to document what each Pokemon does at what time. But an argument of mine is that the community shouldn't be having to do this, and this shit should really be written down from the start to respect player's time.

I think some really solid rules of what can/cannot be done to a boss, and their abilities, phases, etc should be part of patch notes, or at least be released by the developers when they come out.

[Seth]

I respect people having different opinions, but I am just here to say that I like the fact we are not spoonfed with details and that we need to use time to figure things out.

 

That's about it. Have a nice day. 

[TohnR]

Imo you are right, but it's a common thing in MMOs that end game content will not have "specs" (by that I mean documentation) made by the devs and they'll just let the community figure out how to beat it, make guides or extensions to help ... etc etc

 

It's kinda part of the challenge or the experience, altho I agree that with Pokemon it feels awkward because you would expect a Pokémon we already know to behave a certain way, to have a certain movepool or ability ... But that's the wrong thinking here.
When facing boss battles such as Raids, Red or Pumpking, you have to kinda imagine that these mons are fakemons and besides their typing, you don't know much.
From there on don't assume things and just adapt to situations / go from experience 🙂 

[Eggplant]

I'm primarily of the opinion that labbing the mechanics and then making guides is part of the fun. At least, for some people.

Others just gonna have to wait for the guides to drop.

 

It's generally a healthy ecosystem imo, but it can depend on the specific mechanic.

It's arguably less effective for limited-time events where people already have a limited time to grind, they may not want to sacrifice half that time just waiting for someone else to publish a guide.

Unless it's really quick to document, or recurring over many similar events.

[Zuladra]

Keep in mind that we have the collective intelligence of several thousand players against a small team of developers. The aim of not revealing mechanics is to maintain a certain level of difficulty before an optimal strategy is found by players and an update is necessary.

What you say is very relevant regarding the rewards obtained during events like the Wishing Stone or the Tablets.