"Beating a Pelipper raid with a single Magnezone: Why managing raid boss energy is as important as managing your own"

#PokemonGO: During super effective week, I decided I was going to set out to beat as many unique tier 3 raid bosses as possible 1v1. While I wasn't able to beat all of them, be it because I couldn't find the boss (onix), the right weather and set (pinsir and skarmory), or I just kept getting phantomed to death (aerodactyl, caturne, espeon), I was able to defeat 10 of them. Of these, the most problematic was pelipper. At first, it was just the phantoms and regen that kept getting me, but I finally got a phantom free run and... still fainted. This got me curious as to why I was finding this so difficult, as I know others had been able to beat hydro pump sets without issue, so I looked at pokebattler and was... rather surprised at what I saw.Here you can see a magnezone vs pelipper sim against wing attack/ hydro pump, using dodge specials pro perfect dodging, the set I was ultimately able to beat. You can see in the combat log where my issue was coming from: part way through the match, pelipper uses 3 Hydro Pumps in a row, 2 more in a row multiple times, and 8 out of 11 moves used by pelipper in that span are hydro pump. This is a problem, as even when dodged, hydro pump still takes out almost 10% of magnezones health. The problem is that magnezone does 201 damage with one wild charge. Since half of that is generated into energy for pelipper, that means everytime you use wild charge, pelipper can immediately fire off another hydro pump. Sure enough, every repeat hydro pump in the sim came after magnezone used wild charge immediately after the previous hydro pump hit. And no matter how many sims I ran, I was unable to find a single one where wild charge magnezone could do this without fainting.So how was I able to pull it off? Well, interestingly enough, using the overall worse zap cannon instead of wild charge actually granted a victory in this matchup. Turns out, since zap cannon is one bar with a late damage window, you avoid the issue of pelipper being able to fire off multiple hydro pumps in a row.I didn't want to use a TM just for this matchup though, so I figured if I manage pelipper's energy by firing off wild charge in pairs as opposed to whenever I had enough energy, I could avoid the situation. The end strategy I used was actually fairly simple: fire the first wild charge ASAP, as the number of sparks it takes to charge up both wild charges is enough for pelipper to launch a hydro pump. After that I proceeded to charge up two wild charges, and launch two in a row right after dodging a hydro pump. If I got to a third wild charge before it used hydro pump, fire that off when it was safe to do so to keep overflowing pelipper's energy to minimize the number of hydro pumps it could use. The end result, although my execution wasn't as great on this one as on my attempts that got ruined by phantoms, was that pelipper only used six hydro pumps in my run, instead of the 9+ it usually used in the pokebattler sims I ran.TL;DR: When fighting a raid boss that has a one bar charge with a pokemon that has a two bar charge, you can minimize boss charge moves by maximizing the instances of you using both charge moves back to back, instead of using each as soon as it is available. For a move that deals a extremely large amount of damage, this can cut raid boss charges almost in half! via /r/TheSilphRoad https://ift.tt/2QTmJjj