Best Champions for New Players in RAID: Shadow Legends

The champion system in Raid is massive. There are hundreds of champions across every rarity tier, and the game is constantly adding more. For a new player staring at the roster screen trying to figure out who to invest in, it's genuinely overwhelming. Most beginner tier lists don't help because they're either written for veterans who already know the context, or they're so comprehensive that they list fifty champions and expect you to figure out the rest yourself.

This guide focuses on champions that are either free, easy to get early, or commonly pulled from Mystery and Ancient shards. These are the ones worth building in your first couple of months.

Kael — Your Starter, Your Workhorse

If you picked Kael as your starter champion, you made the right call. He's the best starter available and one of the most useful early-game champions in the entire roster. His AoE poison damage is reliable, his single-target damage is decent, and he works in almost every piece of early-game content — campaign farming, Dragon dungeon, Clan Boss, and the Arena.

Kael should be your first six-star champion. Full stop. Don't split resources. Don't get distracted by a shiny epic pull and pivot. Get Kael to six-stars first, gear him properly with Crit Rate and Crit Damage, and let him carry you through the first few months. He's not the flashiest champion in the game but he's honest, reliable, and doesn't require a specific setup to function.

If you haven't started yet, you can play Raid for free and grab him from the starter selection.

Warmaiden — Free and Essential

Warmaiden is a rare champion you get very early through the game's beginner quest rewards. She's one of the most important champions you'll ever own in the early game because she has a reliable AoE Decrease Defence ability.

Decrease Defence is one of the most impactful debuffs in the entire game. When an enemy has their defence reduced, every hit your team lands on them deals significantly more damage. A champion applying Decrease Defence to a dungeon boss on the first turn is worth more than an extra damage dealer on your roster. In Dragon dungeon, Warmaiden opening with her AoE Decrease Defence means Kael's poison and attacks all hit harder immediately.

She's not a long-term champion for most content, but in the first three to four months she does real work. Build her to five-stars at least and gear her for Accuracy so her debuffs land consistently.

Apothecary — Heal and Speed in One Slot

Apothecary is a rare champion who shows up frequently in Ancient shard pulls, and he's genuinely excellent for a rare. His kit includes a heal, a turn-meter boost for your whole team, and a Speed buff. That combination is incredibly valuable across nearly every game mode.

In dungeon runs, Apothecary keeps your team alive while also accelerating your turn order so you get more actions before the enemy acts. In Clan Boss, the turn-meter boost helps your team cycle through abilities faster. He's not doing huge damage, but the utility he provides makes every other champion on your team more effective.

Gear him for Speed and HP. He needs to survive and he needs to act often. If you get him, build him immediately. He'll be useful for longer than most epics you'll pull in your first month.

Frozen Banshee — The Clan Boss Specialist

Frozen Banshee is a rare champion you might pull fairly early from shards, and she has one of the most efficient kits in the game for Clan Boss damage specifically. Her poison sensitivity ability means that when an enemy has Poison Sensitivity applied, all poison debuffs on them deal increased damage. Combined with Kael's poison application, the damage she enables on Clan Boss is disproportionate to her rarity.

She's a one-content specialist. Don't expect her to carry dungeons or Arena. But for Clan Boss — where you're sending your team in every day and your rewards scale with the damage you deal — having Frozen Banshee dramatically increases your chest tier and the rewards you get.

Gear her for Speed and Accuracy. The poisons and poison sensitivity need to land consistently, and she needs to act often enough to keep the debuffs up throughout the Clan Boss fight.

Coffin Smasher — Clan Boss Survival

Once you start pushing into higher Clan Boss difficulties, your team starts taking serious damage. The Clan Boss has a brutal AoE attack called Stun Target that hits your entire team, and without some form of damage mitigation your champions die before the fight is over.

Coffin Smasher is a common or uncommon champion who applies Decrease Attack on his abilities. Decrease Attack reduces the damage the Clan Boss deals to your team by a significant percentage. A champion keeping Decrease Attack up on the Clan Boss consistently is the reason your team survives long enough to do maximum damage instead of dying in the middle of the fight.

He's not a champion you showcase or build for prestige. He's a functional tool that solves a specific problem. Build him for Speed and Accuracy and let him do his job quietly in the corner of your Clan Boss team.

High Khatun — The Day 30 Free Champion

Around day 30 of playing the game, Plarium gives you High Khatun as a free champion through the Login Rewards system. She's an epic, and she's worth the wait.

Her most important feature is her Aura. High Khatun increases the Speed of all your champions in Classic Arena by 24%. That's one of the strongest Arena Speed Auras available for free in the game. As your Arena rank improves and you start trying to build a speed nuke team to climb to Gold, High Khatun in the lead slot makes that team meaningfully faster before the battle even starts.

Outside the Arena her Speed boost is still useful in dungeon content. She's not a damage dealer, but she's a quality-of-life upgrade for every team she's on. Check out our Arena climbing guide to understand why Speed leads matter so much in PvP.

Spirithost — Underrated Early Support

Spirithost is a rare champion that shows up in Mystery and Ancient shard pulls and gets quietly ignored by a lot of new players because she doesn't have flashy damage numbers. That's a mistake. She has an AoE Attack buff that she can apply to your whole team, which increases every champion's damage output. She also has a buff that prevents debuffs from landing on your team for a short window.

In Arena especially, an Attack buff on your team at the start of a fight means your nuker hits harder on their opening AoE. In dungeons, the buff extension and debuff protection help your team stay effective throughout longer fights. She won't win you fights by herself but she makes the champions around her better, which is exactly what a support champion is supposed to do.

What Champions to Avoid Investing In Early

Just as important as who to build is who not to spend resources on. The biggest trap for new players is seeing a cool-looking champion and dumping books and gear into them before understanding whether they're actually useful.

Avoid investing heavily in uncommon and common rarity champions beyond what's needed for specific utility purposes. Avoid spreading XP Brews across six champions simultaneously — pick one, max it, move to the next. And be very careful about spending Skill Tomes on rare champions early. Tomes are precious resources and many rares get replaced by epics and legendaries as your roster grows.

Focus on the champions in this guide first. Once you have Kael, Warmaiden, Apothecary, and Frozen Banshee all properly geared and levelled, your roster has a real foundation. Everything you pull after that point is an upgrade to something that already works.

Building Toward Mid-Game

The champions listed here get you through the first two to three months comfortably. What comes after depends on your shard luck and which epics and legendaries you pull. But the good news is that a well-built team of rares with the right debuffs and support will outperform a badly-geared team of epics in almost every piece of content.

The gap between beginner and mid-game in Raid isn't about having better champions. It's about understanding which stats matter, applying the right debuffs, and building teams with actual synergy. Once that clicks, the game changes completely.

Play Raid for free and start pulling — the champions you need in the early game aren't behind rare shard luck, they're either free or common enough that you'll have them within a few weeks of playing normally.

The "play Raid for free" links in this article are affiliate links.