Raid: Shadow Legends is a gacha game for mobile and PC. It has champion collection; dungeon grinding for gear and stats; a campaign with a “story”; daily quests; long term missions; clans with bosses, quests, and clan vs clan; and player versus player in two forms of arena. And if you’re reading this article, then you’ve probably just downloaded the game and maybe you want to to know how to navigate the games many systems as effectively as possible. This article will give you a variety of starting do’s and don’ts regarding resources such as champions, energy, and shards as well as general account goals. If you don’t read any further – don’t use any resources that you don’t specifically know you should be using. Outside resources and a TL;DR at the end of the post.
First Choices: If you haven’t already started playing, but you’re about to, there’s a couple of things to consider.
- Recruitment bonus: These aren’t massively important long term, but are something to think about.
- Creator codes – periodically, content creators will have recruitment codes that give you decent starting rewards
- Refer-a-friend – If you have a friend that recruits you, you won’t get as much, but they’ll get good rewards as you progress
- Starting champion: If you haven’t yet made your account, or haven’t progressed more than a couple of hours, it’s really worthwhile to start with Kael of the starting options, as that champion is the most versatile early on. Don’t worry about it if you’ve been playing for more than a couple of hours/days, as it won’t cripple your account, but it’s slightly easier to start with him.
Resource Management:
In a lot of ways, the main point of this game is resource management. As a new player starting Raid: Shadow Legends, learning how to most efficiently earn different resources and spend them to get the most bang for your time (or buck, if you’re spending money). Early on the game throws a lot at you pretty quickly and it can be temping to just use it, but the rate you get stuff goes down as the missions and challenges take longer until you get later in the game and it speeds back up. Here are the types of resources and how (simplistically) to use them.
- Energy: Energy refills over time and stops when full. Spend all of your energy as much as you can so it keeps refilling.
- Shards:
- Mystery – Pull as you get them. You’ll have a small chance at okay champions and you’ll get the “food” champions you’ll use to rank up your others. (It’s worth noting you’ll save these too, later in the game, but not for now).
- Ancient – In the very beginning you’ll need to pull them as you get them to get a handful of rare champions to start progression. As soon as you have a few good rare champions, hold onto these ancient shards for special events. We’ll get into those events further in.
- Void – Hold onto these for special events.
- Sacred – Hold onto these for special events.
- Champions:
- Common – After the first few hours, these will just be sacrificed to upgrade others.
- Uncommon – These you might use in the very beginning depending on getting rares. With very few exceptions, don’t upgrade these past 3 star(*). These will also be food for upgrades.
- Rare – Keep at least one of any rare you get until you know specifically that rare is good to get rid of. Most rares should not be upgraded past 4*.
- Epic – Keep all of your epics until you know with certainty you should use it in some other way. These will be most of the champions you use. They can be leveled/upgraded to any point
- Legendary – These are the powerhouses of the game. Very hard to get, higher stats and better abilities (generally) than anything else. Don’t ever use an epic as food. Don’t sacrifice them in any way until you’re late in the game and very knowledgeable.
- Void – Void champions only come from void shards and, while they have the rarities of rare, epic, and legendary they are harder to get than their rarity indicates. Keep 2 of any void rare (until you know you can get rid of them). Save all void epics and legendaries.
- Gems: Gems either get spent on ancient shards (11 for 900 gems) or energy. Early on, you might buy the shards, but energy refills are the best use.
- Silver: This general currency is used in most areas of the game. It’s like the facilitator of all transactions. Save as much as you can, but don’t stress about that.
- Equipment: Early on you’ll equip whatever you can. Other than weapon, helm and shield (which have fixed primary stats), you’ll want to prioritize % stats for attack, defense, and HP over their flat stat counter parts. You can keep or sell anything under 5* rare without a lot of risk, above that, and you should start keeping until you’re sure it’s a bad piece. Don’t take any piece of gear to level 16 unless it’s at least 5 star (or very specific 4 star+ epics).
- Potions: These come from their respective potion keeps and upgrade the stats your champion has. Don’t use them on common or uncommon champions and only on particularly good rare champions.
- XP Brews: Feel free to use these on your starter champion to help level it up as brews just give chunks of XP. Make sure, though, to use them only on champions of matching affinity (color)
- Skill Tomes: Use only rare tomes on your starting champion. Otherwise, save all of the tomes you get until you’re sure the champion is good.
- Keys/Tokens:
- Arena – These keys restore over time, use them liberally early on. Losing rank doesn’t matter until you’re going to push rating.
- Clan Boss – You get 3-4 per day and they refill over time. Once you join a clan, use at least 3 a day.
- Faction Wars – You get 12 per day per faction that is open plus 6 more if you do your quests. Use them all for gear enchants and crafting materials. For time saving, lean towards repeating the highest stage that can be done quickly.
Early Goals:
- Campaign: Clearing normal and hard will be the first step. Don’t worry about getting 3 stars on each stage until you can do it easily. Stage 12:3 is generally the most efficient place to farm experience to level up champions, and even if you can do early brutal stages, you’d be better of farming on 12:3 hard. Ignore nightmare campaign at this point.
- Dungeons: In the very beginning, some of the dungeons may be particularly hard due to limited champions, but work towards being able to clear each dungeon at stage 13.
- PVP: This one is a mixed bag. It’s really a low priority early on, but, given that accounts are matched based on power, new accounts ran by educated players can dominate early. You want to have a speed lead (with speed boost preferred) > defense down champ > attack up champ > damage dealer in that turn order.
- Clan: Join a clan that is killing, daily, normal and hard clan boss. Focus on getting the last chest reward on the highest boss you can. If you can get the highest normal reward, but the second highest hard reward, the normal one is better. The clan boss becomes the absolute best source of resources in the game later on.
- Missions/Challenges: Don’t go out of your way to use a lot of resources on this right away, but be aware of the missions and challenges so you can double dip as much as possible.
Long Term Goals:
- Dungeons: Level 20 of each dungeon on auto.
- Great Hall: Accuracy and resistance are the most important stats to focus on. You get this currency from the arena.
- Arbiter (Missions): The champion you get at the end of the missions (well, end of 5 phases or so), is amazing. Once you have all of the early goals on lock, it’s really worth it to put some focus here and be sure you’re always progressing towards one of these levels.
- We’ll release a general mid-late game guide as some point as well, so bookmark the site.
Special Events:
- Tournaments: Often times, you’ll gain points for these as you play, but placing in the 1st or second place yields a unique gear set. Again, early tournament brackets are easier than later ones.
- Events: These are just filling up a points bar for rewards. Generally harder to get rewards than tournaments. Tournaments are a better use of resources (mostly).
- Summon Bonuses: Periodically, they’ll increase the odds for pulling champions from shards. Usually, this will be from one type of shard. The “2x” events are double the chance of epic and legendary pulls. The “10x” events do not increase your odds of pulling a more rare champ at all. These only increase the odds of getting a specific champion IF you happen to get that quality of pull. They also will do “guaranteed champion” summon events… these require hoarding a ton of shards of that type or spending a lot to get. In the beginning, don’t fall for this bait.
- Fusion/Fragment Summons: These are once per month events that last two weeks and require participation in nearly every event and tournament over that period to collect enough champion fragments or rare champions to fuse and summon one legendary. Early on, these will be near impossible. Here is a fragment and fusion guide to see if you’re ready to go after these.
Spending Money:
As with most games of this type, everything is heavily monetized. It can be fairly pay to win (Is Raid Pay to Win?), but it’s still pretty enjoyable without spending.
- Wait until you’re sure you’re going to play long term before spending money. Don’t buy packs on day one.
- The daily gem pass is the absolute best value per dollar.
- Basically anything outside of the “Limited Special Offers” area is a bad deal.
- Use https://www.inteleria.com/tools/deal-calculator/ to determine if something is a (relatively) good deal.
- When valuing a deal, consider the parts that you actually will use/care about now.
Important Resources:
Hellhades – Guides, resources, news.
DeadwoodJedi – For more advanced users mostly, speed tunes, clan boss guides and more.
Ayumilove – Most convenient place to find general champion tier lists and ability lists.
Inteleria – Uhh, so we just use this for the deal calculator, but it has more Raid: Shadow Legends content.
TL;DR: Don’t want to read all of that? Here’s the short version to get you going as a new player in Raid.
- Focus on your starting champion and get them to 6 star – don’t feed epics or legendaries.
- Push through brutal campaign as fast as possible & farm XP on stage 12-3
- Hoarding is good. Having resources for when you know when to use them is huge.
- Get in a clan and fight clan boss.
- Use the resources above to find out what champions are good and to learn more about the game. Knowledge is very important.
- Come back here in a couple months for a mid-game guide.