Pokemon Violet - 7* Kommo-o the Unrivaled with Slowbro and Magearna

It's the next powerhouse Pokemon raid!

7* Naughty Soundproof Kommo-o (with a whopping x60 HP and a mere 490-second timer) immediately starts with Clangorous Soul, for +1 stat buffs to all five stats, and very soon after that, at 93% HP or 93% time remaining it puts up shield (covering 50% of its health bar). At 75% time remaining it wipes its own debuffs, and at 60% time wipes player buffs; meanwhile, at 80% HP and again at 55% HP it uses Clanging Scales, and at 40% HP wipes its own debuffs and then starts taking a second action 50% of the time.

As implied by its nature, Kommo-o runs a mixed set! In its regular moveset it has Close Combat, Dragon Claw, and Iron Head (all physical), as well as Boomburst on top of two scripted Clanging Scales (both special). The main-moveset Close Combat means it'll very quickly reach -6 Def/SpD, which explains the x60 HP.

Sadly the presence of Iron Head means ghost/fairy Pokemon can't 100% wall it... but there are still good options here.


0:00 - Slowbro

Slowbro (and Slowking) aren't weak to any of its moves and are pretty bulky plus have access to both Iron Defense plus Amnesia plus (super-effective, STAB) Stored Power, which makes them an obvious pick for this raid. Unfortunately resisting fighting but not dragon means that Kommo-o prefers Dragon Claw over Close Combat, so you need to rely on AI NPCs baiting it in order to get the debuffs...

For my runs I found that Kommo-o's free +1 buffs (including outspeeding you) as well as the first-turn lack of defense cheer means it's really hard to actually survive, and so after a few attempts I decided 'actually, let's just deliberately faint for the cheer glitch'... at which point I also realized I should delay my faint so that I skip the 60%-time-remaining buff wipe. Given that the timer was below 50% when I respawned, I really should've fainted earlier (maybe right after the 75% time debuff wipe)...

Apart from that, it's a straightforward Slowbro run. Alternate Amnesia and Iron Defense until leftovers out-heals damage, then 3x Nasty Plot and then nuke it with Stored Power.

One thing I didn't think of was to run Skill Swap, which allows you to steal Soundproof and thus completely block both special attacks (removing the need for Amnesia). On the other hand, that means you definitely can't faint, because that restores your regular ability...

7:51 - Magearna

Yeah, yeah, it's a hard-to-get mythical, I know. Just figured I'd show off how much easier this is thansk to Soul-Heart's free SpA buffs.

...Is what I'd like to say, but for some reason once I saw that Magearna learned Stored Power too I kinda hyper-focused on that and basically just copied the Slowbro strat (including deliberately fainting for the cheer glitch). One fun thing about Stored Power Magearna is that Gear Shift both gives three total buffs in one turn but also lets you outspeed Kommo-o.

But yeah, seriously, you can apparently just win by spamming only Draining Kiss, I was definitely overcomplicating this, hahaha.


Haven't seen too many other strats yet. I did hear about a really funny Opportunist + Mirror Herb Espathra strat (in order to copy the omni-buff twice for Stored Power) which is probably worth a try... though it's a bit of a shame Lumina Crash isn't actually that relevant here since Kommo-o already tanks its own defenses.