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Marill has returned again to solo another 7-star raid, and this time it didn't even need Bellibolt. This one is for all the Marill fans out there and to anyone who ever thought that Azumarill couldn't beat Delphox.
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This build is similar to my Azumarill clear, but with Tera-Water Liquidation instead and the Eviolite item. The EVs go for max Atk and SpD, but the IVs are imperfect because I didn't think it would matter in practice and the natural Lonely nature had no real drawbacks.
I was initially tempted with this calculation, but realized that Marill couldn't afford to drop any survival moves:
+6 252+ Atk Huge Power Tera Water Marill Atk Cheer Liquidation vs. -6 0 HP / 0 Def Tera Fairy Delphox in Rain: 7384-8688 (84.5 - 99.5% of 30x hp boss) -- guaranteed 2HKO
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Then I thought this calculation was reasonable to go for to try to thread the needle and KO between the shield's HP threshold, which is what most of my attempts were aiming for:
+6 252+ Atk Huge Power Tera Water Marill Atk Cheer Liquidation vs. -6 0 HP / 0 Def Tera Fairy Delphox: 4922-5792 (56.3 - 66.3% of 30x hp boss) -- guaranteed 2HKO
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Nevertheless, this was not meant to be and Delphox put me through a lot of pain across the last 24 hours, but it was a real learning experience.
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This strategy went through a lot of trial and error, but is still very similar to Azumarill's clear in structure. My first attempt involved Mudsdale and I noticed some surprising damage, and noticed that Delphox had defense drops that I wasn't inflicting. It turns out that AI Mudsdale has Rock Smash to lower defense past the shield and I locked this in, but it tended to always go for High Horsepower until its 10 PP ran out, and even after it felt like a 50/50 between Low Kick and Rock Smash. An alternate start I was considering was trying to go for an early death to respawn with full HP since I could still set up 3 Amnesia before Delphox's own reset, but it was awkward to figure out how to die sometimes between burn and misses, and I realized those were 5 turns of PP that could be burned so I ended up just trying to stick with living early on. This was still helpful, but my original plan was to get to -6 Defense and OHKO ended up being a futile effort. AI Staraptor and Toxapex don't contribute much, but Toxapex can usually poison and both have some physical moves to contribute on top of the possible defense drops, and Staraptor has STAB Facade.
To sum it up, after lots of attempts failing by not dodging while trying to fish for defense drops, I ended up realizing that prolonging the battle was not helpful for me and I needed to keep this short. If I could stay healthy with more than 50% HP with Belly Drum already up and just tera'd and Liquidation spammed as much as I could, I would probably have a better chance of winning by brute force and giving Delphox less chances to hit me overall.
The general gist of my strategy now was:
- Start off with Amnesias and (at most 4) Mud-Slaps to burn turns and set up
- If healthy enough, try to Belly Drum early on here so I can heal cheer off a burn at the same time
- If not healthy enough or burnt, wait until Delphox resets itself to start getting some Mud-Slaps in before heal cheering to reduce risk of consecutive burns
- After Delphox resets, go for 6 Mud-Slaps and heal if necessary
- Belly Drum here if couldn't do it before
- After 6 Mud-Slaps, start going for tera-water Liquidations to chip shield
- Hope Delphox misses everything and I kill it
There was a lot that could go wrong here. Burn is a death sentence for Marill's DPS and I only have 3 heal cheers to mitigate it as well as manage my health enough to Belly Drum twice. I came to dread the 20%/55HP heals, appreciated the 40%/111 HP heals, and the other ones were almost full so I was thankful anyway. Overall it really just came down to luck, hoping Delphox just missed everything, but it was better than stalling with Liquidation (which is why it is 16 PP) and hoping Mudsdale chose Rock Smash like before. Watching it get OHKOed even at -6 Accuracy in the post-Nasty Plot phase was not enjoyable.
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My final successful run involved 2 early Fire Blast misses that allowed me to get more than the usual setup in, and I went for an early Belly Drum that took me from 160 HP to 21 HP, forcing a heal cheer. Delphox immediately followed up with a Will-O-Wisp, but this time I stalled the clock until I got my first Mud-Slap in to heal from there. Mudsdale was getting some Rock Smashes in at this point. I only had 2 Mud-Slaps down before Nasty Plot happened because of the heal cheer taking so long to animate on every ally (it also activates more loudly in the center if you have a dead ally).
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After landing all my Mud-Slaps, I had dodged most of the wisps that came my way, and Mudsdale had gotten Delphox down to a decent -2 Defense. Psychic landed to drop my Special Defense, but going from +6 to +5 wasn't a big deal in the big picture at that point. Fire Blast also landed to deal about 30 damage. It only took 2 Liquidations to barely break through the shield with the help of the AI chipping in, but now all of Marill's boosts were gone and the Eviolite was nullified.
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I had a free turn from the shield break now, and on the spot I decided to set up Amnesia again in hopes that I would live just one hit if the worst came to worst. Then I heal cheered and rolled a massive heal back to full HP from 83, just what I needed.
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At this point there was no more strategy involved in the fight and it all came down to fate. It was just do or die, staking it all on Delphox's double attacking +2 SpA through accuracy drops and my own health pool. For some reason Delphox didn't actually seem to double attack most of the time except for one time where it attacked after I did. I haven't really seen much of this mechanic, so maybe it is a random chance since the raid lookup site suggests a "second shield rate" which I guess would be 50% here.
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In the end, Marill dodged every last shot that Delphox had, and only needed 4 of its own hits to end it all. Thank you game freak.
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