Still going strong despite the continuing threat of COVID-19, Pokemon GO has kept a regular schedule of changes. Every month, new research is available to players, new Pokemon roam the world, and new challenges appear to be overcome. The biggest of these are the Raid Battles, with a new legendary Raid rotation announced each month by Niantic.
Despite the need for social distancing, Raids in Pokemon GO have remained one of the more social aspects of the game. Each one requires one or more people to come together to fight a powerful version of one of the game's Pokemon. While lower tiers can often be handled solo, the Tier 5 legendary raids almost always need several prepared trainers working in concert.
Since they were introduced, Raids have been seperated into five seperate tiers. Each tier denotes a higher difficulty than the one before it, with significant difficulty spikes between Pokemon. However, these tiers have been affected by some of the bigger changes sweeping through Pokemon GO lately. In addition to increasing Pokemon spawn rates worldwide, Niantic has made a change to streamline Raids somewhat. This amounts to Raid Tiers 2 and 4 being removed, with the Pokemon in those Tiers merging into Tiers 1 and 3, respectively.
The actual amount of impact that changing the Raid Tiers this way will have is not immediately clear. On the one hand, there are now only three Tiers as opposed to five. Difficult Pokemon from Tier 4 have sunk into Tier 3, but how much change has been made to their difficulty? How much will change in the future? It may seem unimportant, but it's important to remember that Pokemon GO has far reaching consequences. After all, Pokemon GO once altered a town's economy completely, not to mention the personal strife it has sometimes caused. For Raids, which require several people to set aside time and effort, it is important to know exactly what a player is going into.
While actual difficulty may be a bit foggier, the rewards situation has been made very clear. Tier 1 and Tier 3's rewards have been raised to match Tier 2 and Tier 4, respectively. So, if the difficulty of the raids are altered in a similar way, it could mean that the change has next to no impact at all. If anything, certain rewards may be easier to get with no downside. Or it could be the opposite, that all rewards are now a little harder to get. It will be important to know which way the Raids swing for sure when preparing for Pokemon GO's upcoming September events.
The one thing that hasn't changed at all are Tier 5 Raids, which are exclusively for legendary Pokemon. The only one available right now is Heatran, so be sure to learn how to catch it before attempting the most difficult Raid available.
Pokemon GO is available on mobile devices.
Source: Dotesports