"Raid Difficulty Rankings Update - Silph Road Website"

#PokemonGO: OverviewHello, travelers! Among the recent updates to The Silph Road website, we now offer raid difficulty rankings alongside the current boss list sourced from the work of the Silph Research Group. This post details the methodology used to generate the rankings. This is the second iteration of these rankings. We've gotten some great feedback from comments here on the subreddit and the community as a whole and have improved our methodology. Further comments are welcome! Before reading, know that these criteria were crafted to a) be rapidly repeatable and b) are targeted at a casual player-base, so they may not suit your exact purposes. Let's dive in!MethodologyThe Pokebattler.com Raid Counter tool is the primary tool used for generating these rankings. Counters are sorted by Estimator, which calculates how many trainers with full teams of that counter would be required to beat the boss under the selected conditions. The lower the Estimator, the easier the boss will be with that Pokémon.Each difficulty level in the rankings corresponds to different conditions for attacker level, friendship boost, weather boost, and relative strength of attacker (see the table below). The ranking for a Raid Boss/Number of Raiders combination is assigned based on the lowest difficulty level conditions under which the Raid is achievable. To insulate the rankings against luck, lag, phantom hits, low IV's, and poor moveset choices, the Estimator values are adjusted up at lower difficulty ratings by the "buffer" value in the table.Difficulty LevelAttacker Pokémon LevelWeather/Friendship Boost?CountersBufferNotesImpossible-----Hardcore40YesBest-Has been completed by someoneHard35No3rd-best0%-Medium30No6th-best5%-Easy25No12th-best10%-Very Easy20No24th-best15%-Split Up20No24th-best15%"Very Easy" with half the number of trainersDiscussionThe ranking procedure is designed for general accessibility and rapid repeatability at low cost. The calculated Estimator value includes damage per second (DPS), survivability, and rejoin time, obviating the need for a custom calculation. Changing the attacker's Pokémon level, counter ranking, and buffer are meant to mimic the lower level and less than perfect ability to optimize to movesets and IV's of a progressively more casual player. Players can always do better than these rankings by making smart counter and moveset choices for a Raid. Being within a few power-ups of these conditions should lead to a successful Raid.By default, raids will be listed as Impossible if the simulator does not believe it to be possible. Deeper investigations with paid simulation tools may reveal possibilities that this model does not identify, particularly at the limits of the simulator. Model-breaking is highly encouraged, and will result in a ranking update to reflect your mighty feat.Travelers are also encouraged to avail themselves of the forthcoming integration of the TSR website with Pokebattler.com, through which the simulations used to generate the rankings will be available directly from thesilphroad.com/raid-bosses.AcknowledgementsThis procedure is based on the outstanding Boss Charts designed by u/yonderkid, and is made possible by u/celandro and his invaluable simulator. Thanks also to the Silph Research Group Raid Ranking team for the cooperative development of this procedure and their dedication to providing the rankings in the face of sometimes daily boss rotations.Got an idea of how to make this better? Let us know!Interested in PokéScience? You can always find us here and tell us everything we could be doing better: https://thesilphroad.com/research-group​ via /r/TheSilphRoad http://bit.ly/2VXl2BK