by Doc – Owner, Founder, Evades Your Questions
If you haven’t checked the builds tier list in a while, go take a look and notice that I’ve changed my mind on many of the useful secondary moves available to most Pokémon. Some of them were obvious ones that I previously overlooked in favor of more universal options, such as Snarl, which lowers Special Attack and hits 95% of the time, but is useless against physical raiders. Some of them were silly ones that still had some merit but not enough to mention before, but are on there for completeness.
However, some of them were not so obvious. Back when I first started Tera Raiding I was advised strongly to use a lot of Sand Attack and Double Team, with the thought being that although you might die within three hits from a raid, that didn’t matter if they were only hitting you half the time. That’s a decent thought, and there’s merit to it, but it just doesn’t cut the mustard as well as other methods available. We were noobs back then. Evasion spam is a mid-tier strategy at best.
Let me break it down for you. Most moves used by the enemy in Tera Raids hit 90 to 100% of the time. It would certainly be convenient to get a freebie every once in a while thanks to our RNG. However, to set up evasion you need to take at least one turn, typically two, to get any significant benefit out of it. A 100% accurate move with -2 accuracy stages will hit 60% of the time. It works 60% of the time, 100% of the time! Or however that quote goes.
So it’s about a 50/50 almost. Great! You’re getting a lot of freebies, but in that time you were not stat boosting enough to self-heal, and you likely were still taking a hit or two. Additionally, most of the ways that you’re going to dodge moves will be through options like Sand Attack, which doesn’t work through the Tera shield nor will it last long, because most Tera Raid bosses wipe their own stats at least once before putting up the Tera shield. If you go the Double Team route, that’s a little bit better, but it just means you’re losing your chance at not taking any damage when the mid-raid stat wipe comes instead of your guarantee of taking far less damage through a defensive stat. The gamble is possibly, maybe taking no damage versus almost certainly taking only some damage.
And that last point is really the most important one. If you’re raising your defensive stats or inversely lowering their attacking stats, that’s a guarantee to stick around until the stat wipe hits. With evasion, you’re using that same turn to try to not take damage. The gamble on average is going to work out in favor of you taking less damage instead of taking no damage overall.
Let’s flesh this out a little bit: suppose I used two turns to run Double Team against a 100% accurate move. The end result is that I’m taking, on average, 60% as much damage as I normally would have, because 40% of the moves are outright missing. Great! But suppose instead I used those two turns to drop a Bulk Up or Calm Mind, raising the appropriate defensive stat by two stages. Now I’m only taking 50% as much damage on average, and I have boosted my attack stats as well. Stat boosting moves achieve damage reduction far better than evasion or accuracy does.
The gamble can pay off, I’m not saying it can’t. There will certainly be those one in 1,000 raids where you absolutely should not have pulled it off but you did thanks to evasion spam. It’s just that the risk-reward ratio isn’t in its favor.
