You drop the slab, the ten-minute timer starts, and ninety seconds later half your base team is face down in the dirt, and the boss health bar has barely moved. I’ve done this. I did it three times in a row against Xenolord before I admitted the problem wasn’t my aim.
The problem was my roster. And if you’re reading this, it’s probably yours too.
Palworld 1.0 rebuilt raids from the ground up, and the team that carried you through Early Access is not the team that clears a Level 80 Ultra with two million HP. Here’s what actually works now.
What 1.0 Broke About Your Old Team
Three changes did most of the damage to old advice.
The level cap moved to 80. Your pals can’t outlevel you, so an underleveled squad gets shredded by overlapping area attacks no matter how good the elemental matchup looks on paper.
Ultra variants got retuned around that new cap. Xenolord Ultra sits at roughly 1.9 million HP on the same ten-minute clock. That’s not a difficulty bump. That’s a gear check with a stopwatch attached.
Over 200 partner skills got reworked. Most party buffs stopped stacking when you carry duplicates of the same pal, so those old five-of-the-same-buffer squads are now four wasted slots. Gobfin’s attack buff to the player survived as one of the exceptions, which is why the Gobfin stack is still the backbone of gun builds.
If you copied a raid army off a video from last year, that’s why it feels bad. Half of it got patched out from under you.
The Raid Army Most People Landed On
The consensus fire and dragon stack in 1.0 is built around two new pals, and it works on almost every boss.
Dupin is a Fire pal from the 1.0 roster with Paldeck number 176. Its partner skill, Trick-Loving Fluffle, waits until your own health drops below 50%, then sets off a fire explosion around you with heavy burn buildup and raises your attack by 30% to 50% depending on the skill level. Read that again. It rewards you for being in trouble. That awkward window where you’d normally back off and heal becomes your biggest damage spike of the fight.
The buff doesn’t stack, so one Dupin in the party is all you need. Level it toward Flame Funnel, Volcanic Rain, and its exclusive Trickster Show.
Eidrolon Ignis is the other half. It’s Dragon and Fire, which is one of the cleanest typings in the game since the fire half cancels dragon’s usual ice weakness. Its partner skill, Resentful Pterosaur, raises its own attack and move speed for every other dragon or fire type in your party. Fully condensed at rank 4, that tops out around a 24% attack boost.
So the two skills point the same direction. Fill your remaining slots with fire and dragon types and both of them get better. That’s the whole idea, and it’s why this pairing beat out squads with individually stronger pals.
Your Party Slots Do More Work Than Your Pal Does
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about raids. In a ten-minute fight against a boss with millions of HP, the single pal swinging at it matters less than the four support slots feeding you damage and keeping you upright.
I ignored this for way too long and just kept breeding a bigger hitter.
Felbat or Lovander for lifesteal. Both run Life Steal, which returns 5% to 9% of the damage you and the pal deal as health. In a fight this long, that’s the difference between finishing and getting knocked out at the two-minute mark. It’s near mandatory for the harder Ultra runs.
Gobfin for raw player attack. Since its buff still stacks in 1.0, multiple Gobfins remain the strongest support setup for weapon-focused fights.
Vanwyrm Cryst for weak point damage, which pairs naturally with any ranged build.
Hartalis for survival. Its Sacred Barrier partner skill generates a barrier that blocks incoming attacks when you’re mounted, and you’ll need to craft the Hartalis saddle at a Pal Gear Workbench before you can use it. Boss attack patterns in the Ultra tier will delete you from full health if you misstep. Having a panic button beats having 5% more damage.
A mount that changes your damage type. Riding a pal like Chillet or Orserk swaps your own weapon damage to that element, which stacks with the Gobfin buff. This is the highest player damage setup in the game and it’s the reason gun builds keep beating pure pal builds at the top end.
Boss by Boss
Six bosses, eleven encounters once you count Ultra and Master variants. Each one wants something slightly different.
Bellanoir and Bellanoir Libero
Both forms are Dark, so dragon attackers run the show. Bellanoir is the entry raid at Level 30 and Libero is the much nastier Level 50 version.
Bring Astegon, which resists the boss’s dark attacks hard enough to tank while it deals damage. Orserk and Jormuntide Ignis both hit well and shrug off the incoming dark skills. Ride Chillet to push dragon damage onto your own gun, which stacks with Gobfin.
Libero’s second phase flips to ice attacks with a big damage spike, so don’t stand in it and don’t count on the phase one loadout carrying you.
Blazamut Ryu
Fire and Dragon, so water and ice do the heavy lifting. Neptilius and Jormuntide punish the fire half, Frostallion handles the dragon half.
Don’t overinvest here. A team bred for Xenolord clears this one comfortably, so building counters used in exactly one fight is wasted effort.
Xenolord
Dark and Dragon, which makes ice and dragon your best picks. Frostallion is the cleanest answer, Bastigor adds a second heavy ice attacker, and Neptilius works as the safer damage slot when Frostallion alone isn’t keeping the team alive.
The real threat is the adds. Xenolord’s meteors spawn Xenogard and Xenovader, and if you tunnel on the boss they’ll overrun your base pals and end the run for you.
Hartalis
The hardest raid in 1.0 and the only one with a full element swap mid-fight. Phase one is Water and Grass and takes extra damage from Electric. Phase two turns the boss Neutral and takes extra damage from Dark. You want two loadouts ready before you ever place the slab.
Orserk is your phase one electric attacker, and mounting an electric pal pushes electric damage onto your own shots too. Wixen brings the fire damage that breaks the barriers Hartalis raises during the fight. Frostallion Noct is the dark mount for phase two, with Bellanoir Libero and Selyne as the dark damage swaps.
Use the pause between phases to swap your base pals over. The transition also fires off a large shockwave, so back off when the first health bar empties.
Moon Lord
The Terraria crossover, and it plays by its own rules. It has no elemental type at all, so bring your highest raw damage instead of building around a weakness. You break it down by attacking its eyes and heart, and it spawns three True Eyes of Cthulhu partway through.
Big pals struggle here since the boss picks targets at random and bulky bodies tend to clump under it, blocking shots and eating area damage. A flyer plus ground fighter mix reads better than five heavyweights.
The Pals Worth Breeding First
If you’re starting from scratch, don’t spread investment across twenty pals. These are the ones that carry.
- Bellanoir Libero. Hatched from raid eggs, some of the highest attack growth in the game, and beam skills that chew through health bars.
- Selyne. Dark and Neutral. It doubles your dark and neutral damage while mounted, which lines up perfectly with the dark-weak phases 1.0 is full of.
- Blazamut Ryu. Raid-bred fire and dragon burst, built for tight timers.
- Jetragon. The safest all-round pick, fastest flyer in the game, strong dragon damage.
- Jormuntide Ignis. The strongest non-legendary damage dealer and far easier to breed than anything above it.
- Frostallion and Frostallion Noct. Your dragon counter and your neutral-phase counter.
Note the pattern. The top of the list is raid-bred, which means raids feed raids. Clear the standard bosses to bank Ultra slabs and breeding materials, then step up.
Passives, Mutation, and Awakening
A bare S-tier pal loses to a fully built A-tier pal every time. Against bosses, the build decides more than the tier does.
Demon God grants +30% attack and +5% defense, and it comes from the new mutation system. It’s the strongest offensive passive you can chase. Legend and Lucky stack cleanly alongside it on the same pal. Flat attack passives beat elemental setups anywhere the target has no weakness to exploit, which includes Moon Lord and the Level 80 final boss.
Mutation happens at birth. Breeding can now produce a mutated egg, and the pal that hatches carries higher base stats plus an exclusive passive normal breeding can’t give you.
Awakening is the last step. Farm Radiant Gems in the World Tree, combine them into an element-matched Awakening Gem, and apply it to a finished pal for a permanent stat boost.
Build order is simple. Breed first, awaken last. Awakening makes a strong build stronger, and it won’t rescue a weak one.
Mistakes That Waste Your Ten Minutes
- Fighting at your production base. Since the Home Sweet Home update you can fight in a separate Raid Area instead. Your working pals get knocked out and your structures take real damage if you host it at home. Use the Raid Area.
- Forgetting the altar is consumable. The slab and the summoning altar are both destroyed by the fight, so a farming session needs spare stone and Paldium ready to rebuild between summons.
- Throwing pal spheres at the boss. Raid bosses cannot be caught. You get the pal from the egg it drops on defeat.
- Copying a five-of-one-buffer squad. Most duplicate party buffs stopped stacking in 1.0. Check the skill text before you breed four of anything.
- Bringing one loadout to Hartalis. It swaps element mid-fight. Two loadouts or you lose the run.
The Average Gamer Verdict on Palworld Raids
Raids in 1.0 reward preparation over reflexes, and that’s good news if you’ve got a job and forty minutes on a Tuesday. You can build the Dupin and Eidrolon Ignis stack over a few short sessions, add a Felbat and a couple of Gobfins, and clear the standard tier without ever getting sweaty about dodge timing.
The Ultra tier is a different animal and it will take weeks. That’s fine. Treat the standard bosses as the part you actually play and the Ultra grind as the long tail you chip at when you feel like it.
And if you’re running these in a guild like I am, split the roles. One person on lifesteal support, everyone else stacking the fire army. Five people each bringing their own favorite mount is how ten minutes disappears with the boss at 60%.
Cleared an Ultra with a comp we didn’t cover? Come argue about it in our Discord We’ve got a running list of what’s actually working post-1.0.
