"Beginner's guide to building a cost-effective raid team"

#PokemonGO: Since gen 4 is rolling-out, it may have enticed some old players to come back, or some new players may have joined us.Hence, I thought it would be good idea to share some insights into building a beginner raid team.Let's first go over why one wants to output decent amount of damage in raids.Being able to solo tier 3 raid bosses. In a lot of areas, during low traffic times of the day, it's often hard to find players who can help out with raids, and for beginning players, you want to at the very least use the one free raid pass for efficient exp/rare candies, etc, and this would go a long way towards advancing in the game.Damage Balls. The less damage you do, the less damage balls you get (0-3). Basically, the number of raid balls you can use to catch the raid boss goes down as your damage drops. Especially for higher tier raids, these couple of balls can make or break whether you are able to catch a raid boss or not.Manners. While more experienced players are always happy to help out newer/more casual players (and in our local raiding community, we do our best to do so), we often find that there are times when we end up not getting raid bosses (when we should have more than enough players) because people are using worse than neutral lineups (using grass type moves against moltres for example). And it does take us good amount of time/resource to actually go to the raid location, use our raid pass, revives, etc so that we can help, and it is kind of frustrating for everyone involved when we don't get the boss (even if we didn't need the raid).PvP. With PvP on the horizon from Niantic (supposedly), you want to be able to hold your own and beat your friend. Because it's fun. And knowing how to do damage will help with that goal.Now that we got that out of the way, let's go over how to do decent amount of damage in raids. In Pokemon GO, there is concept of STAB/Counters/Resistances/Weather Boost, all of which affect the damage you are able to do.STAB. Basically, you get 20% damage boost when you run moves on your Pokemon that are same type as your Pokemon. This means that usually, you want to have moves on your Pokemon that leverage the STAB bonus. So Fighting pokemons, you want Fighting moves, and vice versa. There are certain exceptions, but we won't worry about that for now.Counters. If the type of moves your Pokemon is running counters the Pokemon type, then you do 40% damage boost. So for example, Vaporeon with Hydro Pump will do 40% more damage against a Rock type (which it counters), than say, Normal type (which is neutral). And against Pokemons that have two types that your moves counter, you do multiplicatively more damage (1.4 * 1.4 = 1.96), so pretty much double your damage. An example would be using Fighting moves against Tyranitar who is Dark and Rock. Dark and Rock are both countered by Fighting, and hence Fighting will be doing double damage over neutral matchups.Resistances. Same concept as counters, except that now you lose your damage. For example, using a water type move against grass type (singly resisted, or ineffective). Then your moves do only 71.4% damage. If you are using psychic type move against dark type (doubly resisted, or immune), then your moves will do 51% damage.Weather Boost. You get 20% damage boost if you are using Pokemons with moves that are boosted by the current weather in-game. For example, if you use Flareon with fire type moves during a Sunny weather, then regardless of matchup, you will get 20% damage boost.Okay. So now you have fair idea of why you want to do damage, and what factors affect the damage you can do. So let's jump into how to leverage these knowledge to build a raid team.First, you want to have composition of team types that can cover most of the types that are in game. Every type in Pokemon Go has varying number of types it covers, and it's important to make it so that you don't have many overlaps (so that you don't end up spending precious resource on redundant Pokemons).Second, you want to choose Pokemons that you can obtain. For example, Smackdown TTars are currently best counter for Moltres, who has double weakness to rock (and smacktar is the top rock dps atm, that will change though). But where the heck is one supposed to find a Smacktar?Third, decent availability through wild catch (and not exclusive to raids or eggs). Stardust costs really start adding up when you have to power up multiple Pokemons, and IVs don't really matter that much unless you are min-maxing or in certain edge case scenarios, from DPS standpoint. And wild catches can go upto lvl35 for free with weather boost, whereas raids/eggs are lvl20 and 25 with weather boost, which would save lots of stardust. Of course everyone wants that hundo (and I've plowed through 150+ M2 raids to find my hundo), but it's more for collectible value than practical.With these in mind, let's go through which Pokemons I think you should use to build your first raid teams.Fighting Type. Fighting types have one of the widest type coverages in Pokemon GO (Normal, Rock, Steel, Ice, Dark), on top of Cloudy weather (which boosts fighting type damage) being fairly common around the globe. Also, it's the only type which is effective against Normal, which also happens to be the most common gym defender types as a result (since it's only weakness is fighting). The top fighting types have the fortune of being fairly easy to catch in the wild. Machop and Makuhita both have good spawn rates, and are also pretty common in 2km and 5km eggs respectively. Machamp (evolved Machop) is higher DPS option, while Hariyama (evolved Makuhita) is the bulkier option.Water Type Water types have three type coverage (Rock, Fire, Ground), two of which are not covered by Fighting. Rainy weather is also a fairly common weather in game around the world. Lastly, Water types tend to have better base Pokemon stats (more attack, defense, stamina) than other types that compete in similar realm (Grass for example), which makes them pretty good generalists in Rainy weather. While Kyogre, the top water Pokemon, is impossible to get at this point of time, the next best two, Gyarados and Vaporeon, are available. If you already have caught lots of Magikarps, then I would recommend Gyarados (since it is more DPS than Vaporeon), but I understand that some places will not have many Magikarp spawns. Thus, I'd recommend that you build a team of Vaporeon. Not only was there three day long Eevee CD, but Eevee in general can be easily obtained through field research and wild spawns in suburbs. Also, more experienced players usually have Kyogre/Gyarados teams, which means that it would be easier to ask them for free Vaporeons, which they have no use for at all.Fire Type. Fire types have four type coverage (Bug, Steel, Grass, Ice), two of which are not covered by Fighting or Water. Sunny weather is also fairly common weather in game. For same reasoning as Vaporeon, I would recommend Flareon here. It is currently the 3rd/4th best fire type after Moltres and Entei.Steel Type. Guys, Beldum CD is coming, and with Meteor Mash, Metagross is going to become the 3rd neutral DPS pokemon in game (Provided Niantic doesn't do bait and switch). Addition of Steel gives us the Fairy type coverage, on top of it now being a good generalist to use in neutral weather conditions for things not covered by/resisting Fighting, Water, and Fire (Psychic, Dragon, Flying, Water). Against Fighting you can use any of the three squads we built depending on weather condition. Anyways, catch as many Beldums as you can.These types should cover most of the use cases. Now, your goal for raids is to get some Psychic and Dark types. Psychic type gives us the Fighting type coverage, and Dark types give us the Psychic type coverage. I'd say go for as many Ttar raids as possible using your Fighting squad (you should just need you +1 experienced player), all the while going to M2 raids and using either Water or Fire squad depending on weather boost, plus any Ttars you get.Now, you may ask, how do I get Dragon and Flying type coverage (which are the two missing?), well, Fairy, Dragon and Ice are super effective against Dragons, and Electric Rock and Ice are super effective against Flying. Ice type covers both. In which case the easiest decent one you can get is probably Pilloswine, which is also a very easy T3 raid boss (just use your fire/fighting squad depending on weather) with some wild spawns of Swinub (unevolved version). Also it has gen 4 evolution coming which is projected to be top Ice DPS legendary/non-legendary included.Also, Water type coverage. Reason why I don't mention this is because I forgot, and also unless Kyogre is back in raid boss rotation, I really don't see the need for the coverage. But your choices here are either Grass or Electric. Between the two, unless you have Raikou/Zapdos lvl 25+ already (as decent electric types are pretty hard to get depending on location), I'd suggest Grass, with your picks being Exeggutor/Alolan form (probably easiest to obtain, I prefer Alolan version due to its double resistance to water), Venusaur, Torterra (currently boosted everywhere), Victribell (?). I really wouldn't recommend Meganium though, keep them where they belong - in Professor Willow's grinder.Lastly, I would advise that people don't level Pokemons up past level 30. The amount of stat you gain is halved, while stardust/candy costs increase, so you pay a lot for pretty much nothing. There are some cases you want to level past 30 on Pokemons for damage/bulk breakpoints, but at this stage you don't need to worry about it.Anyways, I hope this post was remotely helpful and let me know if there are mistakes/or have more questions about this, I kind of went off top of my head for the most part & didn't proofread.Q: What if I can't get Eevees? I missed CD and there are no Eevees at all in my area :(A: For water, Empoleon (pretty easy to obtain at the moment) or Swampert (hatches from egg all the time). If none of the above, just use the strongest water type you have. Even Kingler, Seadra, Omastar all work. For fire, Blaziken (hatches from egg), Infernape (pretty easy to obtain at the moment), or whatever fire type you can find.tldr;must have: Machamp/Hariyama, Vaporeon, Flareonif you can get: Metagross, Pilloswinework towards: Tyranitar, M2 via /r/pokemongo https://ift.tt/2Alxlz0