Raid Gear Guide for Beginners — What to Keep, What to Trash

Gear is where most new players quietly sabotage themselves. You're drowning in loot, you don't know what any of it means, and you're accidentally equipping the worst pieces on your best champions. The champion gets blamed. The game feels unrewarding. You think you're just unlucky with pulls. You're not — your gear is the problem.

Here's how to fix it.

The Six Slots

Every champion has six gear slots: Weapon, Helmet, Shield, Gauntlets, Chestplate, and Boots. The first three give you flat Attack, flat HP, and flat Defence as their main stats. They don't vary. You equip them for the set bonuses and the substats, not the main stat.

The last three — Gauntlets, Chestplate, and Boots — are where things get interesting. These slots can roll percentage main stats, which scale with your champion's base stats and end up being far more valuable than their flat equivalents. They can also roll Crit Rate, Crit Damage, and Speed as main stats. This is where most of your gearing decisions actually happen.

If someone tells you to focus on the last three slots first, they're right.

Main Stats That Matter

For most champions, you want percentage main stats on Gauntlets and Chestplate. ATK% on a damage dealer, HP% or DEF% on a tank or support. Flat ATK and flat HP as main stats are not worth building around — the numbers don't keep up as you progress.

For damage dealers, Crit Rate on Gauntlets is strong if you're not capping Crit Rate through substats and sets alone. Crit Damage is the ceiling-raiser once you've got Crit Rate sorted — once you're consistently landing crits, more Crit Damage means those crits hit harder.

For Boots: Speed. Almost always Speed. Speed is so important in this game that other Boots main stats need a very specific reason to be chosen over it. If you're uncertain, pick Speed.

Speed Is King

I'll be direct: Speed is the most important stat in Raid, and most beginners treat it as an afterthought.

More Speed means more turns. More turns means more hits, more heals, more debuffs applied, more buffs refreshed. A fast healer keeps your team alive longer. A fast poisoner applies more poison stacks before the boss dies. A fast debuffer keeps the enemy locked down more consistently. Everything in this game is built around turn order.

That means Speed substats on your gear are precious. A piece of gear with a Speed substat is worth keeping even if the other substats are average. Speed substats that roll multiple times as the gear levels up are worth significantly more. When you're scanning your gear asking what to keep, Speed substat is one of the first things you look for.

If you haven't started yet and want to see what all this fuss is about, play Raid for free — the gear system takes a few hours to click but once it does it becomes genuinely compelling.

Sets Worth Knowing Early

Gear comes in sets. Equip enough pieces from the same set and you activate a bonus. Here are the ones that matter early:

• Speed (2-piece): Increases Speed. Use it on almost anyone. Two pieces makes it easy to slot into any build.
• Life (2-piece): Increases HP. Use it on HP-based tanks and supports as a fallback while you farm better sets.
• Lifesteal (4-piece): Your champion heals based on damage dealt. Use it on damage dealers in Clan Boss and dungeons to reduce reliance on a dedicated healer.
• Offense (4-piece): Increases Attack. Use it on pure damage dealers once you have the pieces.
• Crit Rate (2-piece): Increases Crit Rate by a flat amount. Use it on damage dealers who are struggling to hit the Crit Rate cap.

Two-piece sets are easier to build because you only need two matching pieces. Four-piece sets ask for four matching pieces, which limits your flexibility — you only have two slots left for a second set or standalone pieces.

In early game, Speed sets everywhere is not a bad default.

Don't Gear Level-1 Champions

This catches a lot of new players out. When you put gear on a champion, that gear is locked to them. Taking it off costs silver — the game's basic currency — which adds up fast if you're equipping and unequipping carelessly.

More importantly: gear scales with the champion's base stats. A level-1 champion with great gear is still a level-1 champion. The gear does almost nothing useful until they're leveled up.

Only gear champions you're actively using and leveling. If you're not sure about a champion yet, leave them naked. The silver and the mental overhead of tracking gear across dozens of champions isn't worth it.

Decide on your core team first. Gear them. Ignore everyone else until you have a reason to promote them.

What to Sell and What to Keep

This is where people make the most expensive mistakes, both by selling things they should keep and by hoarding junk they should clear out.

Keep six-star gear with good substats. Keep five-star gear if it has Speed, Crit Rate, Crit Damage, or percentage substats — especially if more than one of those appear on the same piece. The quality of substats matters more than the quality of the set, outside of a few specific cases.

Sell gear that is one, two, or three stars without hesitation. Sell flat-stat pieces on the last three slots — flat ATK Gauntlets, flat HP Chestplate, flat DEF Boots are almost always vendor fodder. Sell four-star gear unless it has at least two worthwhile substats.

Don't mass-sell without looking. The game will offer you bulk-sell options and it's tempting to just clear your inventory in one tap. Scroll through first. You will occasionally find a five or six-star piece with a Speed substat buried in the pile, and that piece is worth more than the silver you'd get for twenty commons combined.

One more thing: glyphs. Later in the game you'll unlock glyphs, which let you upgrade specific substats on your gear. A piece with a Speed substat becomes significantly more valuable when you can push that substat higher. Keep that in mind before you trash pieces that are currently underwhelming but have the right substats.

Where to Farm

Dungeons drop gear, and each dungeon drops specific sets. You're not farming gear randomly across the whole game — you're targeting the dungeon that drops the set you need.

For general all-round gear including Speed, Lifesteal, and Offense sets, Dragon's Lair is your primary target. It's accessible early, drops useful sets across difficulties, and is where most players spend the bulk of their gear-farming time. If you're not sure where to farm, start there.

As you unlock more dungeons, check what sets each one drops before you commit your energy. The Ice Golem, Spider's Den, and Fire Knight all have specific drops worth targeting at different stages. But early on, Dragon's Lair is your default answer.

The Rule That Fixes Most Beginners

If I had to compress everything above into a sentence: chase Speed, keep percentage substats, gear only your real team, and stop selling on autopilot.

That's it. You don't need to understand every mechanic on day one. You don't need perfect gear to progress. You need to stop equipping flat-stat rubbish on your best champions and stop accidentally selling pieces with Speed substats because you didn't look.

Build your core team, put Speed on them, and farm Dragon's Lair until the gear improves. The rest follows naturally — and if you haven't started yet, play Raid for free and see how quickly it clicks once you know what you're looking at.

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