Purpose of This Page

This is just a writeup that I put together based on my experiences playing through all of the raids throughout Compass' development which I think might be useful for some people.

There is not a lot of information about the specifics of the raid mechanics or construction out there, and some of the original concepts which still get spread around or hit the top search results are incorrect, or at least won't really apply since Compass raids are differently designed with different intentions compared to vanilla.

This is not a guide, necessarily, but it can give more insight into making appropriate decisions to deal with the high-end raids.

Everything contained in here is focused around the post-game (6★ and 7★) Compass raids, but the information will often also apply to lower-tier raids, as well.

Player Priority

The single most important thing in raids is to survive.

While the 1.1.1 patch has increased the timers on raids to make the requirement less strict, getting knocked out — especially solo — will drastically hamper your ability to complete the raid. Not only does the timer bar take a significant hit to remaining time, but the NPCs will not perform any actions while you are being further penalized by the waiting timer.

It's a triple-whammy of bad.

Consider your defenses first, then figure out how to get enough damage to complete the raid. Being knocked out even once can reduce the timer by 10-15%, and the windows for victory are already tight. A second KO will have you lose 15-18% in addition to the first, and it's very unlikely you'll be able to secure a victory after having lost so much time.

The best strategy for solo play is to counter the raid, rather than focus on maximizing your damage. Don't let the raid do whatever it wants, cut its strengths, capitalize on its weaknesses, minimize its effectiveness, etc. That is the key to victory.

Ditto Breeding

In order to facilitate easier breeding for getting decent stats for your late-game and post-game preparation (in addition to Bottle Cap training), Compass includes a special event 4★ Ditto raid with 5 max IVs. So keep an eye out when you're making your way through the game, because this when holding a Destiny Knot, can transfer multiple max IVs down to its offspring. Combine that with the Power item of a particular max IV you want to get, and you can easily get four or five max IVs on your offspring.

Also of note for breeding, you can get Ren's Specialty Quiche which has Egg Power Lv.3 by visiting Rio, Ren, and Roo's Restaurant in Montenevera. It's a cheap and easy to get and hatch your eggs. The icon is on the map~

When breeding your Pokémon, keep in mind as well that you do not really need all six IVs maxed out — You can reduce the effort required here by focusing primarily on a single attack and defense stat to match the strength of this Pokémon with the weakness of the raid encounter. Having more maxed stats will give you a bit more flexibility in what raids you can use this Pokémon, but if you're targeting one in particular, you don't need to go through the extra steps of all-maxed IVs.

Another page was created specifically to catalog my solo completion of every raid for the 1.1.1 patch,
which you can find by clicking on this link.

Early- to Mid-Game Raids

1★ up to and including 4★ raids are all progression-oriented raids, meant to be something to tackle as you make your way through the story. The rewards you'll receive primarily are useful for roaming the world, or for boosting up some of your Pokémon in a small fashion so as to not trivialize the main story's content.

They can be viewed as an alternative to grinding trainers to get enough experience to tackle the next stages of the story if you find that you aren't as fond of trainers or wild encounters, or just want something different.

Late-Game Raids

5★ raids are the first of the final tier of raids, and are generally going to be the "core" of what forms the end-game or build up to post-game content. Their rewards are pretty solid for the time investment, giving you a few EV items to use for building up your team so that you can challenge the post-game tournament / rematches and the higher-tier raids.

Their medium to medium-high difficulty does not necessitate catching / breeding and raising up specific Pokémon to counter them, but they're also not so simple you can just waltz in with one of your story Pokémon and expect to sweep every time without some consideration for what the raid is about.

Post-Game Raids

6★ and 7★ raids are all meant to be challenge raids that require specific strategy and fully trained up Pokémon, of high and very-high difficulty, respectively.

You're expected to catch or breed and then train so that you can tackle each encounter specifically, and expand your repetoire of Pokémon and general strategical options to be able to tackle all of them. You'll often find that you need to adjust the Tera, moves, ability, or EV setup in order to succeed in some raids, and you are expected to fail. A lot. That makes the satisfaction of earning that legendary or the special loot rewards all the greater.

Overview

Every raid has manually set moves and special raid-exclusive extra actions. The encounter's movepool can pull from every source it legally has access to in this gen, but the extra actions are unique to each raid, and include moves that the Pokémon may not actually have, or the three special raid actions (explained below).

Extra actions only occur once per action per fight — they are configured to trigger under either HP remaining or time remaining conditions, and will only trigger each once. There are up to six of these available for every raid, and the 6★ and 7★ will often (and always, in the case of 7★) have all six being utilized.

These extra actions can be any move in the game — in Compass, this often results in the "setup" type moves, such as significant stat boosts, or weather or terrain conditions — but are chosen with specific strategy in mind, either creating or covering for a weakness meant for the player to learn and adapt to; for instance, if the raid sets up a certain weather, it's going to be significantly beneficial for it, so one potential strategy is to bring your own to override it or have an Ability like Cloud Nine.

The extra actions can also be one of three special actions : reset player, cleanse boss, or steal Tera orb charge. Not every raid uses all of them, as some are designed around moves instead of these special actions, but most raids utilize at least one or two of these at various points.

Player Reset

The player reset action will remove all stat changes on all of the raid players / allies, and prevent all player / ally Abilities from functioning for the next turn. This is used by some raids to slow the player's potential for scaling up to maximum stats, or in some cases to counter prevalent stat boosts (Belly Drum comes to mind) to help cover for a weakness of the raid. In these cases, weakening the raid will be more effective.

Boss Cleanse

The boss cleanse removes all negative effects such as status condition and stat reductions. For encounters that want to rely on their high base stats or other strong moves, keeping themselves from getting overly weakened due to stat reduction moves is very useful. Since this also cleanses conditions like Burn or Paralyze, its timing can surprisingly change the tide of a fight. Some encounters have powerful shield phases that use this action to enforce that concept. In these cases, strenghtening yourself or using guaranteed secondary effect conditions will be more effective.

Tera Charge Steal

The Tera orb charge steal action just reduces the total of attacks performed that count toward your ability to Tera your Pokémon by one. It's sometimes useful to delay the player from being able to immediately counter the shield phase, but has little purpose and isn't used all too often in Compass.

Overview

At a certain point in the fight, nearly every raid in late-game will go into the shield phase, during which a portion of their health bar is protected by a shield.

This shield has three special characteristics :

• It provides damage mitigation to the raid encounter
• It changes status move effectiveness while active
• It cleanses the raid Pokémon of status conditions.

The damage mitigation portion of the shield varies from fight to fight in Compass, as some encounters have very powerful but small shields, and others that have huge shields that are generally weaker. They do, however, all have nearly the same effective HP total, but will vary in terms of how much mitigation they provide to the different mitigation types, as below.

Mitigation Types

Raid shields have three types of mitigation :

• Mitigation versus non-Tera moves
• Mitigation versus Tera non-STAB moves
• Mitigation versus Tera-STAB moves

Versus Non-Tera Moves

If you are not Terastallized, you'll be dealing "non-Tera" damage, and universally, non-Tera moves deal the least amount of damage to the shield. This can be all the way down to 20-35% normal damage, making even your strongest boosted moves very ineffective.

This mitigation is independent of your STAB bonus, so you'll want to spend as little time doing this type of damage as possible.

Versus Tera Non-STAB Moves

When you Terastallize your Pokémon, but are using moves that are not that Tera type (e.g. you have a Dark Tera but are using Lunge, a Bug move), that is Tera non-STAB damage, which is better than non-Tera damage — even though you aren't getting STAB bonus, the mitigation against these types of attacks by the shield is reduced compared to non-Tera attacks.

Versus Tera-STAB Moves

Where possible, you'll want to make the most of this.

Status Conditions

When a raid encounter goes into its shield phase, it will cleanse itself of any detrimental status conditions, such as Burn or Paralyze. It will not, however, cleanse itself of certain "condition-like" effects, such as Leech Seed.

Additionally, the shields also make the encounter immune to direct detrimental status moves, such as stat reductions (Screech, Eerie Impulse, etc.) or status condition moves (Glare, Will-O-Wisp, etc).

They are not, however, immune to the conditions or effects themselves, but you'll only be able to apply them via secondary effects; moves such as Nuzzle will apply Paralysis, Fire Lash will reduce defense, etc. Abilities can also apply status conditions, such as Synchronize or Static.

Because you can only Terastallize your Pokémon once in the entire fight, winning or losing will often depend entirely on making the most of this. Save your Tera for when the enemy has their shield up, and ensure you can survive long enough to make appropriate use out of it!

You have access to three Cheers : Attack Boost, Defense Boost, and Healing.

All cheers affect all allies.

Worth noting that these Boosts only last a certain amount of turns, and ally turns do also tick it down — It's basically four or five actions with these boosts. There are no visual indicators that these are currently active.

Both the Attack and Defense Boost cheers provide a special 50% increase to all relevant stats for all allies, which stacks with every other boost in the game, but not with itself (cannot Attack Boost more than once at a time, for example). These can be very powerful, and are a good idea to use when you can make the most out of them — don't use Attack Boost if you'll be knocked out before you can make use of it, don't use Defense Boost if the next attack will knock you out, etc.

The Healing Cheer is ... terribly unfortunate. It heals a random percentage of HP, which can sometimes be not enough to help you survive a single hit, and sometimes it'll full heal the entire team. It's close to a last resort in many cases, such as keeping your allies allive while they're getting boosted damage from their Terastallizing, or if you've boosted them up, or just need to buy one or two (sometimes) turns.

Status conditions that last a certain number of turns, such as Sleep and Frozen, are counted for each action the encounter performs — this means that it is counted when your raid allies take their turns as well. Subsequently, this will make these conditions feel incredibly lacking compared to others that last indefinitely. When playing with other players, they're still useful conditions that can potentially save a teammate or at least in general reduce the total damage of the raid, but for solo play, they rarely last more than a single action.

Burn and Paralysis, on the other hand, last the entire encounter — or until they use a boss cleanse or put their shield up. This makes them disproportionately powerful throughout a raid if applied early. Burn reduces physical damage dealt and can, through a single condition, turn the tide on a heavy physical attacker, and Paralysis can sometimes shut down an encounter for many turns — it can also stop the raid's extra actions from happening, if they're normal moves (it won't stop the cleanses or the shield).

Toxic and Curse are also useful in that they apply throughout the fight similar to Burn and Paralysis, but because of the way raids are structured and how their damage is calculated, they may only add around 0.8% to 1.2% damage to the raid encounter per turn. On the other hand, raids can often last a dozen or two turns, so this passive damage source can add up. Unfortunately, as they are cleansable and the shield removes them, and neither Toxic nor Curse can be reapplied (Fling with a Toxic Orb or Poison Fang can apply badly poisoned against shields, though), they may be significantly less effective in raids with big shields or that cleanse multiple times.

Because shields make the encounter immune to direct status conditions and cleanse them of these, it's usually worth considering moves that can apply a condition as a secondary effect instead of as their only effect (e.g. Nuzzle over Glare, Fire Lash over Tail Whip), even if they are less generally effective.

Given that the 6★ and 7★ raids are all (ace challenges notwithstanding) mythicals and legendaries, this does mean that they have often very high base stat totals, and that can be quite oppressive to try to tackle head-on. So reducing their stats or boosting yours to withstand their oppressive values is a simple but very effective strategy in a lot of fights.

Status Moves that harshly reduce or sharply increase stats (the two-stage boosts) can be very effective. The reduction moves are limited to only being able to be applied without the raid's shield being active, however.

Additionally, many raids that are vulnerable to this strategy will employ boss cleanses, and will remove all the negative modifiers you have applied; when combined with a shield, this will make these moves entirely useless, and this can happen at crucial points that can make this phase very difficult.

As such, while useful in some raids, for most, it might be a better choice to look at moves with secondary effects that modify stats instead. The initial effect might not be as strong, but since these can be applied even while the raid's shield is active, they can be instrumental in preventing being shut down during that portion of the fight.

And because survival is so important, there's a high value in moves that sharply boost your appropriate defenses, such as Iron Defense or Cotton Guard against physical attackers, and Amnesia against special attackers. Many raids will use player cleanses that will remove these effects, and they will need to be re-applied, which can certainly lead to periods of vulnerability during the fight, but their value even then is still very high.

Shell Bell

Just going to come out and say it right here : Shell Bell is immensely strong in raids.

Normally, the percentage-based heal is not especially great, but in raids, because of the very high health total and generally high amounts of damage you'll be outputting (you are using supereffective moves targeting the encounter's weakest defense, right?), you can get enough healing from this item to survive an additional attack fairly frequently.

Those occasional crits that heal you for as much as a Moonlight are so satisfying.

However, Shell Bell is still a low-priority, as it's meaningless to consider restoring health if you're unable to deal damage because your own stats are reduced, or there are specific items which are just too powerful against the encounter to ignore.

Sometimes, focusing on preventative items instead of offensive items is the correct choice — for instance, if the encounter uses multiple stat reduction-type effects, then a Clear Amulet will prevent that from happening, and will effectively mean the encounter is wasting important turns or its limited extra actions doing nothing to you.

If the encounter uses moves with secondary effects that can be hugely impactful for you, maybe a Covert Cloak is the way to go, since it will prevent those entirely.

Abilities can cause otherwise subpar Pokémon to be considered a strong counter to some matchups. Being able to ignore the encounter's stat boosts (Unaware), or negate entire types of damage (Storm Drain, Flash Fire, etc), or return detrimental effects (Synchronize) should absolutely be considered when building up a Pokémon for the encounter.

Unaware

One of the most generally-powerful Abilities in raids, Unaware is fantastic both offensively and defensively. Taken into a raid that has powerful offensive ramping will mean nothing to you, and you can guarantee consistent damage even against high defensive ramping encounters.

Of course, taking this into encounters that don't do any stat manipulation is a waste, so don't think just because you have this you are guaranteed to win. It's just immensely powerful in the above scenarios.

Secondary Effects

Moves with guaranteed secondary effects, particularly those that decrease or increase stats, such as Fire Lash, Acid Spray, Lunge, Mystical Fire, and Lumina Crash, can be incredibly powerful, as they will guarantee a reduction in overall damage dealt by or an increase in damage dealt to the raid Pokémon. This occurs even if the boss has their shield up, so you can continually bring their most important offensive stat down, or boost you or your raid allies' damage to simply overpower it.

Moves with chance-based effects are of course basically never as good as the guaranteed ones, but can make for enough difference if their effect does trigger that it might be worth considering these over similar moves that might have 10 or so more power but no effect. For example, a single Fiery Dance proc can make all your subsequent Fiery Dance hits much more powerful than if you had used Flamethrower exclusively instead. This isn't as ideal as the guaranteed effect moves (Torch Song, when compared with Fiery Dance, for example), but if you don't mind a bit of RNG, these can be strong.

Nuzzle will always apply Paralysis, even if the raid has its shield up, which can cause the raid Pokémon to lose multiple turns in total. It doesn't work against Electric Tera, but you'll be able to Paralyze Pokémon that would otherwise be immune.

Recovery Moves

Moves that have a health drain component are also very strong, such as Leech Life, Drain Punch, Giga Drain, and Bitter Blade. Not counting when the encounter has its shield up, in general you will be dealing a very high amount of damage, since you'll only really want to be using moves that you have STAB or super effective bonuses for to begin with. It's not uncommon for these moves to heal you for half or more of your health, and they synergize very well with offensive items like Expert Belt, since they tie their defensive component into your offensive component.

Recovery moves, like Slack Off, Roost, and Moonlight are also quite useful moves, though usually only in combination with other components like a defense boost or damage reduction effect on the raid Pokémon. Being able to reduce the damage you take to less than these moves can heal you will allow you to stay alive and keep that timer from chunking down.

Tera Blast

Tera Blast is generally a strong option, with 80 power and 100% accuracy, while ensuring it will always use your highest offensive stat for damage. More than that, however, it always has STAB bonus when you're Terastallized, making it effectively always 120 or 160 power.

Given that shields reduce damage from Tera-STAB moves (using the same type of move as your Tera type) the least of the three mitigation types, and Tera Blast will always be Tera-STAB, this means it will always be quite effective.

Thanks to this move, it's possible to choose a Tera specifically to counter a raid's Tera type, even though the Pokémon you want to use does not have any STAB moves with that Tera type.

However, if you are using a Pokémon that has Tera-STAB moves, they may often have moves with higher power or other effects that would be more worthwhile than Tera Blast. For example, a natural Fire with Fire Tera Pokémon that has Flamethrower will deal more damage with that than Tera Blast, because it has the same typing arrangement but higher power.

But Tera Blast is a "powerful" move because it can enable different Tera-based strategy and can fit on everything while being generally strong.

Self-Weakening Moves

Moves that may hit hard but reduce your stats, such as Close Combat, Headlong Rush, and Overheat, are terrible choices for raids.

They're solid options in normal gameplay where you can usually guarantee a one shot on your opponent, and therefore not have to worry about the detrimental effects, either because you win the fight or can get a free swap afterwards. This isn't the case in raids, and will make you either very vulnerable, or just too weak to complete them.

Even if you have moves that can boost your stats, you're effectively spending extra precious turns to deal with the side effect of the original "powerful" move.

Moves like Belly Drum have therefore limited use-case for raids. They can be planned around, but these downsides can be far more detrimental than their slightly-increased damage totals are worth.

Status condition moves that are their primary effect, such as Glare are often not as good choices as Nuzzle, since these Status Moves do not apply if the raid encounter has its shield up, whereas secondary effects such as from Nuzzle do.

Inferno guarantees a Burn, but its accuracy is terrible, and can result in never afflicting Burn.

Many moves simply do not function in raids, or their functionality is heavily limited due to the nature of raids. For some examples : Houndstone's Last Respects does not ever gain increased power. Soak does not change the type of the raid encounter, as Tera overwrites that in all cases. Things like Whirlwind or Roar do not affect the enemy.

Important Note : Flip Turn, U-turn, Volt Switch, Shed Tail, etc., do not function entirely in raids — They do not swap out the Pokémon, causing some Abilities such as Zero to Hero and Regenerator to not trigger.

At the same time, some moves behave in ways that aren't maybe as apparent as they sound — specifically, moves that hit all Pokémon, such as Earthquake, don't hit your allies. In fact, moves that would normally deal damage to your allies do not, so moves like Bulldoze and Parabolic Charge are safe to use.

To go along with this, though, is that moves that provide benefits to your allies do affect all of your raid allies, so moves like Life Dew, Howl, and Aurora Veil can end up being incredibly strong.

There are several factors that go into choosing a Pokémon for raid encounters, and it's not "just pick the strongest sweeper you have" (the majority of the time, at least). In my personal opinion, the priority order is as follows~

Survival

The most important thing in raids is being able to survive them. Getting knocked out once or twice is often fine and recoverable, but three or more times is almost a certain loss.

Try to select a Pokémon that is resistant, immune, or at least neutral to the encounter's moveset.

Going into scouting battles with the encounter to determine what moves it uses is useful to figure out what coverage it has, giving you important information you can use to find a Pokémon that can handle the moves.

There are not many situations where you can just tank through the raid that's using supereffective moves against you — In battles of attrition, the raid will almost always win.

STAB and Tera Damage

Try to select a Pokémon that has powerful STAB moves that is supereffective against the raid's Tera, so that you can deal high constant damage. And try to select Tera-types that match these STAB moves, so you can deal the most potential damage during its shield phase.

For example, if you are against a Dark Tera, you may wish to look at powerful Bug-type moves, such as Leech Life or Pollen Puff. If you have a good user of a move like that in mind which also happens to also be Bug-type, that would be ideal, because on top of the 2x supereffective bonus, you'll deal 2x STAB damage while Terastallized, which is also Tera-STAB damage to the shield, and you'll get the 1.5x STAB damage even outside of your Terastallizion. But you could also consider just swapping your Tera-type to Bug, since you'll have the 2x supereffective move with 1.5x STAB all the time, and get the full Tera-STAB bonus when you do Terastallize.

Sometimes, you may want to use a Tera with a Pokémon that doesn't have strong or even any STAB moves, so don't forget you can always slide Tera Blast in to resolve this weakness~

Appropriate Stat Matchups

Try to select a Pokémon that matches up appropriate stats to the encounter, both offensively and defensively :

If the raid encounter is a powerful physical attacker, choose Pokémon that have high defense or health values or can boost their defenses / reduce the raid's physical attack, and if the raid encounter has low special defense, choose Pokémon that deal special damage, etc.

This may mean looking at Pokémon that have "low" base stat totals, but better to find a particular one with high values in a single category that aligns better with the raid encounter than generally-high stats that don't do anything for the fight. For example, Clodsire has low Def at 60, but if matched up against an encounter that uses only special attacks, its SpDef of 100 is significant, and its low Def is irrelevant. An Avalugg in the same scenario with its terrible SpDef would be a much worse pick, despite having a much higher BST total.

Which is to say, the overall total Base Stat values aren't as meaningful as the relevant individual Base Stat values.

Swapping your EVs around to slide 252 into an appropriate defensive stat can make a significant difference in your ability to survive, which I consider the most important part of raids.

Counter the Raid with Utility

Try to select a Pokémon that, through its moveset or Ability, counters the moves, Ability, or extra actions of the raid.

For example, if the raid boosts its stats frequently, then bringing Pokémon that either aren't affected by those boosts (such as a Pokémon with Unaware against a stat-boosting raid) or Pokémon that can reduce or eliminate those changes (using stat reducing moves, Clear Smog, or things like Mist or Haze) will be important to secure a win.

Subsequently, some raids are very vulnerable to having their turns skipped (such as through Paralyze), or having their general effectiveness reduced (including "weak" detriments such as accuracy reduction) because they don't cleanse themselves of these detriments; if the raid uses multiple boss or player cleanses, bringing boosts or effects that get canceled out from these cleanses is not very useful overall, since you'll be wasting too many turns to keep the effects applied.

Overall

The overall goal of "pick a Pokémon that's strong to what the raid does and can capitalize on the raid's weaknesses" seems obvious, but the specificity required by most of these raids may have you looking at Pokémon that you wouldn't normally have considered.

S-tier story or Ace Tournament or competitive Pokémon may be C-tier or worse here, but some might be S-tier against very specific Pokémon.

I won't be providing a list of what I consider to be good or bad Pokémon, because there are many potential circumstances where even "bad" Pokémon have the potential to be effective, and I'm certainly not one to say I've thought of every single possibility out there.

I may have found a lot of success with some Pokémon like Gastrodon, Clodsire, or Delphox, but I'm also biased toward them since they're some of my favorites, and might have overlooked other or better options because of that.

Experiment! Don't be afraid to fail~ You may find that you enjoy using some Pokémon that you never had reason to before~

Compass expects you to catch, raise, and train a lot of Pokémon to be capable of handling all of its post-game raid content; after all, isn't that the point of Pokémon? That's what makes the game fun. Catching and having a use for so many different Pokémon gives so much more variety to the endgame and makes it all the more satisfying to have worked toward and triumphed over a challenge. At least, that's the idea with Compass' raids.