Arena can be a tough area to excel in Raid Shadow Legends and it’s vital for progression both in missions and in great hall. The tiers also provide stat bonuses in all the areas of the game. If you’re struggling in early game and you want to git gud, this guide will help you chart a plan on how to progress properly. This page will focus on early game that is defined as having your starter or campaign farmer solo 12-3 brutal. In arena terms it’s progressing from Bronze to Silver tier. You can check out a general early game raid shadow legends guide here.
You should be able to reach Silver and we will showcase a recently started 7-day old account that does exactly that.
The Basics of Early Game Arena
Raid is a turn-based game, and going first gives a huge advantage in arena especially in early game where champion defence tends to be low. To determine which team goes first, Raid introduces the concept of a “turn meter” race. Without going into the complex details the general speed attack team sequence is:
- Be Fast: Use 1, and commonly 2 speed boosters to go first for your whole team. This means the first 1-2 champions boosts the speed of your whole team, allowing you to equip powerful slow attack champions to do the real damage and not allowing the enemy to respond!
- Atk Up: this step is optional. It helps your main attacker, but step 3 is more important
- Defence Down on Enemy Team: Set your nuker to succeed by reducing enemy defence (all enemies).
- Nuke: Use 1 AOE attack to kill all or most enemies, making them unable to recover. Moves 1-3 are simply there to set-up for the final nuke.
Short FAQs
To get them to go all first, they have to be incredibly fast and will not do much damage, and if they don’t go first then the enemy will kill them easily.
Yes if equipped with correct gear, which will be shown later in this guide.
This depends on your opponent and it is a continuous gear race even at top level.
The following flowchart can be used to consolidate the main points below.
Selecting your Champion in Arena
There are multiple champions that can fill the roles suggested above. For early game, unless you are very lucky, you will probably be using mostly rare champions with 1-2 epics at best. below is a non-exhaustive list of Epic and rare champions who fit the roles well.
Gearing is super important. You must have focus on what you want each champion to achieve. Try not to gear them as multi-role champions and instead focus on a singular purpose (fastest champion, highest accuracy champion or hardest hitting champion).
Speed Aura and Primary Speed Lead (fastest champion): Speed Boots, Speed sub-stats for all other gear. Do not care about primary and other stats. Use speed sets for bonus if possible, and Lore of Steel mastery.
Secondary Booster (second fastest, generally X% slower than 1, where X is the TM boost value from 1.): Speed Boots, Speed sub-stats for all other gear, do not care about primary and other stats. Use speed sets for bonus if possible, and Lore of Steel mastery.
Defence Down AOE (third fastest, generally Y% slower than 2, where Y is the TM boost value from 2.): Speed Boots, Mixture of Accuracy and Speed sub-stats for all other gear, do not care about primary and other stats. Use speed/accuracy/perception (craft in forge) sets for bonus and Lore of Steel mastery.
Nuke AOE (slowest 1 speed below 3.): [Must be 100% crit rate or 75% crit rate for Starter champions like Kael] Speed Boots, Attack % Chest, Crit rate gloves. For Weapon, Helm, and Shield: use Crit rate, Crit damage, and Attack % sub-stats.
Forge and campaign are your best friends to get this equipment. You can farm 5 star Speed boots in brutal campaign for your champions efficiently with your starter and forge can provide the much needed accuracy for you in all areas of the game.
Example Set-up
You can see the gear on Kael is made up of the starter lifesteal set given to everyone and some perception gear.
Using the Strategies in a real Arena RAID
Diabolist is the speed booster and has to be the fastest. You have to play her on manual unfortunately. Spirithost provides the speed aura. Warmaiden provides the AOE Defence down. Kael nukes.
A note to consider is that the levels on everyone except Kael are low. The sequence of your turns and gear are much more important.
Another thing to consider is that team power is meaningless from early to late game. You can see it in the victory screenshot below. Team power calculated by favouring resistance over anything else, and since it is irrelevant to both you speed boosters and your nuker, it is actually almost completely irrelevant as an indicator. Unless the enemy team has 300k+ power, indicating they are highly geared for defence, usually it has not meaningful whatsoever.
Don’t worry about legendaries or epics. If you go first and kill everyone does it matter what champion border they have? The vast majority of legendaries in Bronze are not built or utilised correctly and can’t break the sequence of the speed team. Do read up their skills and learn from both your victories and your losses though.
Matchmaking below gold tier takes into account your total player power and your team. This means it’s much more beneficial to follow the early game guide and focus on just a few champions rather than gearing and levelling a whole squad to 50 that you’re not going to use. Pick who will be your core champions in the mid game carefully and check out the mid game arena guide for silver tier action (WIP)