RAID: Shadow Legends – Beginner’s Guide: Tips to Become a Better Player – Gamer Empire

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RAID: Shadow Legends is a strategy RPG mobile game featuring more than 400 unique champions, each with their own set of skills and playstyle.

The objective of the game is to beat stages of enemies, collect champions, build your ultimate team, upgrade and customize your champions, and read new heights with your clan.

Plarium is the developer and publisher of RAID: Shadow Legends – they are also behind other popular mobile titles like Viking: War of Clans.

You can create an unimaginable number of unique teams and customize your champions in a ton of ways, including gear sets, masteries, and glyphs.

Because of the endless possibilities in RAID: Shadow Legends, new players can easily feel lost at the beginning.

That’s why we’ve created this guide to teach you tips and tricks on how to become a better player.

Table of contents

Basic combat mechanics

Combat in RAID: Shadow Legends is turn-based, which means you get to choose skill and target for each champion, and then the enemy gets to do the same.

All champions have one or more skills that are turn-cooldown based, which means they can’t be used every turn.

Skills with cooldowns are more powerful than regular skills and often buff allies, debuff enemies, higher crit chance, or other powerful attributes.

In battle, new players tend to use exclusively use damaging skills.

However, using damage boosting buffs often result in a higher damage output in the end.

Later on in the game, once you reach more difficult stages, you need to bring defensive buffs, and healing skills to survive.

If you only bring damaging skills, you will not be able to sustain the enemy before they take you out.

When you start playing RAID: Shadow Legends, using the auto-battle feature is very useful.

You can quickly beat stages and progress through the game, even if you don’t have time to focus on playing entirely.

However, once you reach later stages, you want to start playing on manual instead, as decisions of skills will impact the outcome of the stage.

Another feature you should take advantage of when in a battle is the in-battle indicators.

These are small symbols above the head of enemies, which shows whether your selected skill does extra, less, or normal damage to a given enemy.

A green symbol means extra, yellow means normal, and red indicates less.

We’ve written a complete guide on in-game mechanics and the affinity system in much more detail, check out our combat and affinity guide here.

RAID Shadow Legends in battle gameplayRAID Shadow Legends in battle gameplay

Improve your champions’ power

There are a ton of ways to improve the stats and power of your champions in RAID: Shadow Legends, and you should take advantage of them all.

In short, these are all the ways to upgrade your champions.

  • Level up
  • Ascend
  • Upgrade rank
  • Upgrade skills
  • Upgrade and enhance artifacts
  • Unlock masteries

Only leveling up your champions can be done without spending in-game resources, and even with this method, you can level up your champions significantly faster by spending XP brews, silver, and sacrificing other champions.

All other ways to improve the power of a champion require some in-game currency you can collect by playing the game.

Some resources related to upgrading champions are a lot easier to gather than others.

Mastery tomes for unlocking masteries, potions for ascending, common champions for leveling, and silver for enhancing artifacts are the easiest to obtain.

Therefore, if you wish to quickly improve the power of a champion, farm one of these four resources.

You can find information about what resources you need for each way to upgrade champions in our guide on how to upgrade and rank up champions in RAID: Shadow Legends.

Furthermore, we’ve written a guide on how to get all resources in the game to help you acquire your desired resources.

Though we recommend you upgrade your champions as you play, there are some resources you should spend wisely, which is exactly what we’re covering in the next section of this guide.

Don’t spend resources recklessly

Many players get an urge to spend their resources on champions once they obtain them, especially if they are stuck on a stage.

Depending on the kind of resource and the champion, this might be a very bad idea.

Some resources are extremely scarce and, therefore, much more valuable than other resources.

In general, it’s always a good idea to think about how you invest your resources, but the following are some you want to be extra careful about spending:

  • Epic skill tomes
  • Legendary skill tomes
  • 4-star chicken
  • 5-star chicken

To upgrade a champion’s skills, you need skill tomes.

If the champion is of legendary rarity, you need legendary skill tomes to upgrade its skills.

Likewise, if a champion is of epic rarity, you’d need either epic or legendary skill tomes.

All other champions can use the much more common to come by, rare skill tomes.

Throughout the new player events, progression events, and login events, you will receive rewards such as epic skill tomes and epic champions.

It might be tempting to use those epic skill tomes on the epic champions but do some research first.

We recommend you check out either our guide on the best champions in the game or our examples of excellent teams in our team building guide.

These two guides will give you a deeper understanding of the value of different epic and legendary champions in the game.

Once you spend your skill tomes, there is no way to refund them.

Chickens are another scarce and valuable resource in RAID: Shadow Legends because they can be used as a sacrifice when upgrading a champion’s rank.

4-star and 5-star chicken are hard to come by, and thus you want to hold spend these wisely.

3-star chickens are also valuable, but 3-star champions are much easier to come by than 4 and 5-star champions.

3-star chicken acts as a replacement for ranking up 3-star champions, so you can spend if you believe a champion on your team is worthwhile, even if it isn’t one of the best champions in the game.

Complete daily tasks

Completing small daily tasks will add up to a massive amount of resources, progress, and valuable items, and though each task might not feel like much, over time, things add up.

Daily quests are a great example of this. Almost every daily quest is very simple and takes no time to complete.

A typical daily quest is ‘make 4 artifact upgrade attempts’, ‘use 50 energy’ or ‘beat a campaign boss 3 times’.

XP, silver, and potions are pretty much the only reward you can expect from daily quests themselves.

However, one of the monthly quests requires you to complete 30 daily quests and claim their reward.

Once you’ve completed that quest and the remaining monthly quests, you will receive a Sacred Shard, the best shard in the game.

Therefore, doing daily quests will have a major impact in the long run as a guaranteed epic or legendary champion can significantly change your teams’ power.

Contrary to many players’ beliefs, you don’t have to do all 30 daily quests within the same month to complete the monthly quest.

You can take, however long as you wish, but doing it fast will help you progress more quickly.

Once you complete all five monthly quests, they will reset, and you can earn yet another valuable resource.

You should also spend resources that refresh daily, such as Arena entrances, Clan Boss keys, and energy.

Also, be sure to check out which time-limited dungeon is available at the moment.

Time-limited dungeons all offer potions for a specific affinity, so if you need potions to ascend a spirit champion, you should farm the Spirit Keep when it is available.

Collect stars in campaign and faction wars

In the campaign and in faction wars, players get a rating of one to three stars upon clearing a new stage.

If you get one star on a stage, you can redo the stage as many times you want to collect the remaining two stars.

Both the campaign and faction wars have their own reward system related to the collection of stars in stages.

There are a number of milestones you can reach, all of which give you some reward.

You can see these in the rewards bar located at the bottom of the screen when browsing the campaign, or under the info tab in faction wars.

Many players don’t focus on collecting stars as they progress through the game.

However, purposely trying to get two or three stars on each stage can help you progress through the game even faster.

Many of the rewards allow you to upgrade your champions’ power or summon new ones, which will improve your team.

The requirements for getting one, two, and three stars from a stage are different in campaign and faction wars.

Here you can how the number of stars you get is determined in the campaign:

  • One star = Clear the stage
  • Two stars = Clear the stage without losing a champion
  • Three stars = Clear the stage with two or fewer champions in less than 10 minutes without losing a champion.

Because most players won’t have a lot of champions of the same faction early on, this is how the number of stars is determined in faction wars:

  • One star = Clear the stage
  • Two stars = Clear the stage with at least 3 champions without losing a champion
  • Three stars = Clear the stage with 5 champions without losing a champion

Unlock the Sparring Pit

The Sparring Pit useful building that allows you to passively level up your champions without having to do anything except press level up.

Once unlocked, you can put in any champion, and it will passively gain XP.

You can even see how long till it’ll level up next.

Only one slot is available in the Sparring Pit, to begin with, but you can unlock more with gems.

Specific slots can also be upgraded with gems to give more XP per hour than usual.

Do notice that while a champion is training in the Sparring Pit, you cannot bring it to battle.

But if you wish to do so, simply remove it from the Sparring Pit.

Some days you might want to use your best champions all day.

In this case, you cannot put them in the Sparring Pit during the day, but be sure to put them in before you go to sleep, as you’ll wake up to your champions having received a ton of XP.

You unlock the Sparring Pit building when your account reaches level 15.

To gain more XP for your account, progress through the game, clear dungeons, etc., and do quests.

Even though the Sparring Pit is a useful building, we recommend spending your gems on the Mine before unlocking new slots in the pit.

Sparring Pit RAID Shadow LegendsSparring Pit RAID Shadow Legends

Summon new champions

Obtaining new champions is one of the main aspects of RAID: Shadow Legends, and according to many players, one of the best aspects of the game.

Not only is getting new champions exciting at the moment, but also afterward as you can now put together a new team.

Besides it being fun to obtain new champions, it is also very beneficial as it often increases your team’s power directly by swapping the new champion in or sacrificing it to boost another.

That’s why you should focus on getting new champions if you wish to progress through the game faster.

The main way to obtain new champions in the game is by summoning them at the Portal by spending shards.

There are four types of shards, Mystery Shard, Ancient Shard, Void Shard, and Sacred Shard.

You can learn how to obtain each of these in our guide on how to get shards in RAID: Shadow Legends.

You are now ready to take on the world of RAID: Shadow Legends and become a top player!

If you have any tips and tricks you believe other players should know, you are welcome to leave them in the comments below.