Raid: Shadow Legends: the campaign-first path for new accounts

Raid: Shadow Legends is a turn-based collection RPG from Plarium, played on the PC client with a large roster of champions, stat-heavy gear and a long list of game modes. New accounts feel overwhelming because every mode seems to want attention at once. The truth is that for the first few weeks almost everything you need comes from one place: the campaign. This guide builds around that.

Before you start

• Choose your starter champion deliberately; it carries your account for a long time.
• Do not sell or use as fodder any rare or better champion until you know its role.
• Do not scatter gear upgrades across many champions early; focus your best set on your carry.
• Save energy refills and XP boosts for when you can play in long sessions.
• Link the account so progress is safe before you invest real time.

Step 1: Build your starter champion first

Whichever starter you pick, the plan is the same: level it to the current star cap, take it to level 50, fully ascend it, and rank up its skills with skill tomes when you can spare them. A poison or percent-health starter is especially good because that damage scales against high-HP bosses. This one champion becomes your campaign farmer, your early boss damage and your carry for other players’ co-op content, so it deserves the first slice of every resource.

To get there without grinding food champions by hand, use the campaign to level a batch of cheap common champions in the low teens, then feed all of them into your starter at once. Rank-up materials in Raid come from sacrificing other champions, so treat every low-rarity pull as fuel rather than a keeper. Do not use rares or better as fodder until you are certain they have no role for you.

Step 2: Farm the campaign

The campaign is your engine. It drops champions to use as rank-up fodder, silver, XP and gear, and it is where you build every other champion. Your medium-term goal is to reach and comfortably auto-farm a late campaign chapter on Brutal difficulty — a stage many veteran accounts still run daily for silver and materials. Push story progress on Normal and Hard as your team allows, then settle into farming the best stage you can clear reliably.

Step 3: Get your stats priorities right

Gear in Raid is all about substats, and beginners over-value flat damage. A rough early priority:

• Accuracy so your debuffs actually land on tougher content.
• Speed so your champions act more often.
• Defense and HP so they survive to act.
• Damage stats (Attack, Critical Rate, Critical Damage) after the above are covered.

A fast champion whose debuffs land beats a slow champion who hits hard but misses.

Step 4: Join a Clan Boss clan

Clan Boss is one of the best sources of shards, chests and brew for gear upgrades, and its rewards scale with how much damage the whole clan does. Join a clan that already clears a solid Clan Boss difficulty so you get those chests while you are still weak, and work your own Clan Boss team up over time. An active clan also unlocks Hydra and other clan content later.

Step 5: Do the boring dailies

Daily quests, the daily login track, and free progression events pay out shards, energy, silver and upgrade materials on a steady schedule. Clearing dailies with a few campaign runs, an arena fight and a Clan Boss key takes minutes and compounds fast. This unglamorous routine is what separates an account that is strong in a month from one that is still stuck.

Pay attention to the progress missions and the current in-game events while you do this. Because your daily actions — leveling champions, upgrading gear, clearing campaign stages — already tick those trackers, timing them so they overlap with an event that rewards the same actions gets you a second payout for no extra effort. Do not spend energy chasing event points on activities you would not otherwise do.

Step 6: Do not spread your gear

You will collect far more gear than you can upgrade, and the upgrade currency is your real bottleneck. Put your best complete set on your starter carry first, then on the next one or two champions you use every day. Upgrading a piece to the mid ranks and checking its substats before pushing further stops you from pouring resources into gear that was never going to be good. Everything else is sell fodder for silver.

Key takeaways

• Pick one starter champion, get it to 5 stars and level 50, and ascend it early.
• The campaign is your main activity for weeks; work toward farming a high-chapter Brutal stage.
• Prioritise Accuracy and Speed on gear before raw damage stats.
• Join a clan that already beats Clan Boss for the shard and chest income.
• Do the daily quests and free events; the steady rewards outpace anything flashy.