Raid: Shadow Legends Guide – Tips, Cheats and Strategies

Raid: Shadow Legends is a brand new gacha RPG that, thankfully, trades the typical anime-style visuals for a more realistic, dark fantasy look.

It’s a truly stunning experience, with some of the finest attack animations and environmental effects we’ve seen in the genre so far.

As is standard with this genre though, the game pretty much plays itself. So if you ever find yourself stuck in battle, it’s not down to your ability but your stats.

That’s where the real challenge comes in. It’s not so much a difficult game to play, but to manage – particularly if you don’t plan on spending any actual money on the various upgrades.

So that’s where we’ll focus on in this guide: progressing throughout the game without spending money. We’ll advise activities you should perform and how often, how to get new equipment and heroes, and more.

Raid: Shadow Legend Tips and Tricks:

• Complete all achievements as soon as the tutorial is over: As soon as the, quite frankly dull, tutorial finishes, tap the ‘Quests’ button and then ‘Achievements’. Complete all of these in sequence right away. They’re easy activities that you can complete without difficulty, and shower you with one-off rewards that will give you a serious head start.
• Complete all Daily, Weekly, and Monthly quests: If you genuinely don’t want to spend a single penny on Raid, you’re going to have to put the time in instead. The biggest commitment you’re going to make is to complete every single Daily, Weekly, and Monthly quest without fail. Why? Because these provide you with rewards that are incredibly difficult to get without spending real money, like gems and shards.
• The same goes for playtime rewards: At the bottom right of your screen, you’ll see a timer ticking down. When this hits zero, you get a new playtime reward. If you play for 180 minutes each day (and by play we literally mean have the game open on your phone) you’ll get the maximum reward. Again, these are often items that you’ll struggle to get as a free player, so if you want to take this game seriously, do so every day.
• There’s no need to save your shards: You use shards to summon new heroes in Raid and, unlike in many other gacha RPGs, there’s no need to hold onto them. In many games in the genre, you can get more heroes by summoning in bulk but that isn’t the case here. There’s no downside whatsoever to just summoning immediately – so do it!
• Save your gems for the gem mine: There’s a bunch of stuff you can spend gems on in the shop, but none of them are more valuable than the mine. This costs a whopping 500 gems, which will take you some time to save for if you play for free, but earns you a substantial number of gems once owned. Buy it, upgrade it to max, then spend your gems on stuff you want in the shop. Only then.

• Elemental weaknesses give you a significant battle advantage: If you’re struggling in battle, bring a few units that have an elemental advantage against enemies you’ll face in battle. Even if these units have a lesser star rating, they might actually perform better due to the advantage.
• Upgrade all equipment to +8: Upgrading equipment is pretty cheap, and the advantages are generally worth it, so there’s no reason to skimp out. We recommend upgrading all equipment you use to at least +8 by default, because it’s cheap the chances of success are almost certain up to that point. Conversely, we only recommend you attempt to upgrade equipment to +16 if you plan on using it long term.
• Grind previous levels to level up lesser-used heroes: If you find yourself needing a low level hero with an elemental advantage in later levels, don’t be afraid to revisit earlier levels to boost them a bit. It’s not a waste of time, as you’ll earn more money and perhaps a few items anyway.
• Focus on a small team of your favourite heroes: Those willing to splash the cash can get away with building a huge team of powerful heroes but us free players don’t have that luxury. You’ll just be wasting resources and time levelling up heroes you won’t use very often. Instead, pick a nice balanced team of your favourite heroes. Pick the highest star hero you have in each element and stick with them, only swapping them out when you find a hero with more stars.
• Pay attention to artefact bonuses: When equipping gear, pay attention to the artefact bonuses. These provide statistical boosts for equipping a certain number of the same coloured equipment. Any equipment of the same colour you equip after that will not provide a further bonus, so bear that in mind.

Glen Fox

Head of Editorial

Glen has over a decade's worth of experience in gaming journalism, writing for Pocket Gamer, Pocket Tactics, Nintendo Life, and Gfinity. When he's not badgering everyone about the dangers of passive text, you can probably find him playing Wild Rift.