I am now trapped away from my PC which means that I cannot play the game I got sucked into after SV anymore (Dwarf Fortress). I do have a Switch with me though so I went back to Pokémon and started making more maxed-out lvl100 raid build Pokémon. So far I have completed that Azumarill, a Gholdengo (steel SpAtk attacker… nice), the raid Charizard, and I’m nearly there with a Kingambit and Wo-Chien. Next I’m probably doing a Tyranitar and my Skeledirge.
The more of these raids I do the more respect I have for the Tera Type mechanic. I think it’s actually rather brilliant in a PVE context… when you do a raid you are solving a 5-way type weaknesses puzzle sometimes. You gotta defend agaibst the attack types/STAB capabilities of the raid pokemon’s original typing, but attack against their Tera type, and if they’re dual-typed then you are bringing your typing against three relevant enemy types. Usually the problem is only five-way because you need your Tera type to match one of your base types in order to do STAB moves on the enemy’s Tera type, so I wouldn’t recommend bringing a truly creative Tera typing to PVE… nevertheless, it’s a lot of fun. High level raids fail constantly because the typing puzzles are genuinely quite hard and most players don’t seem to have the library of leveled Pokémon ready to use in any situation yet. Many people seem to just bring an Azumarill or Iron Hands to every battle and fail miserably at half of them.
I haven’t tried PVP yet but I imagine Tera typing is also a big brain game there, as you need to know quite a lot about all moves available to every Pokémon in the enemy party to anticipate what kind of Tera typing they’d use. I’d be surprised if anyone is bringing anything but a STAB advantage to those though so maybe it’s not very complex.
Anyway! It’s a cool mechanic. It’s definitely cooler as something you’re attacking against than something you’re attacking with, though, which is a bit of a flaw, but I’m having fun anyway.