RAID Shadow Legends Beginner Guide: Your First 30 Days

RAID: Shadow Legends has a reputation for being complicated, and honestly, that reputation is earned. The first time you open the game it dumps a champion selection screen, a dozen menus, and three different currencies on you within about five minutes. Most new players spend their first week doing the wrong things, burning resources on the wrong champions, and wondering why the game feels so grindy and unrewarding.

This guide covers what you actually need to focus on in the first 30 days. Not everything — just the stuff that matters.

Pick Kael and Don't Look Back

At the very start you pick one of four starter champions. The options rotate sometimes, but if Kael is available, pick Kael. He's the most useful starter for the longest stretch of the game. His kit has poison abilities and AoE damage that scale well into mid-game content, he farms the campaign fast, and he can contribute to Clan Boss and Dragon dungeon runs before you have a proper roster built.

The other starters aren't bad, but Kael's poison damage is reliable and doesn't depend on you finding specific gear or building him in a complicated way. For a beginner, that matters a lot. Simple champion, clear purpose, good results.

If you want to play Raid for free and see what the starter selection looks like yourself, the game is available on PC and mobile.

Week One: Campaign and Resources

The campaign is your main progression path in the first week. Work through Normal difficulty. You don't need to three-star every stage — just clear them and move on. The goal is to unlock harder campaign stages that give better XP and silver rewards, and to reach the point where you can auto-battle stages for passive farming.

Every XP Brew and Rank-Up material you get in this period should go straight into Kael. Get him to six-stars as fast as you can. New players almost always spread resources across too many champions at once, and it kills their progress. You want one strong champion you can rely on, not six mediocre ones.

Silver is tight in the early game. Don't upgrade gear that you're going to replace in two days. Focus on getting the gear quality up on your main team and leave the rest alone until you have more resources.

Join a Clan on Day One

Seriously, do this immediately. Open the Clan menu and find any active clan with space. It doesn't need to be a top clan. It just needs to have people who fight the Clan Boss regularly.

Clans give you access to Clan Boss chests, which are one of the best sources of shards, gems, and gear in the game. The rewards scale based on how much damage your team does to the Clan Boss each day, but just participating and doing any damage is better than not joining at all.

Clans also give you access to Clan Boss XP bonuses and the ability to receive and send items through the clan store. You're leaving a significant amount of free progress on the table every day you're not in one.

Understanding the Great Hall

The Great Hall is a permanent stat upgrade system that improves your champions across the entire game. You unlock it by earning medals in the Classic Arena, and each upgrade you buy stays forever. It's one of the most impactful long-term progression systems in Raid and most new players ignore it for weeks.

You don't need to obsess over it in day one, but you should be doing your Arena battles every day even early on. The medals accumulate and eventually you start buying Great Hall bonuses that give all your champions a small percentage increase to stats like HP, Defence, Accuracy, and Speed. Those bonuses compound across hundreds of champions and help with every piece of content in the game. Read more in our Arena guide for beginners when you're ready to seriously push your rank.

Dungeon Basics: Start With Dragon

Once you've cleared most of the campaign on Normal, the game opens up its dungeon system. There are multiple dungeons and it can be hard to know where to start.

For most players the priority order looks like this: Dragon first because it drops the best all-round gear sets, then Clan Boss for daily rewards, then Spider and Ice Golem once your team is stronger.

Don't try to rush into high dungeon stages. It's much better to comfortably auto-battle stage 10 than to barely scrape through stage 14 with deaths and failed runs burning energy. The gear that drops on stage 10 is still useful, and you can farm it reliably.

For Dragon, you want a team with Decrease Defence, Weaken, and ideally some Poison. Kael handles a lot of that himself early on. Look through your roster for champions who apply those debuffs and pair them with him.

Gear: Main Stats Are Everything

Gear has two parts that matter: the main stat on each piece, and the substats that roll when you upgrade it. As a beginner, focus almost entirely on main stats.

The most important rule: Speed boots. The boots slot should have Speed as the main stat on every champion you care about. Speed determines turn order in every piece of content. A faster champion acts more often, applies more debuffs, heals more, and deals more damage over time. Speed boots with a Speed main stat are always correct until very late in the game.

For offensive champions, Crit Rate is the main stat priority for the gloves slot (aim for at least 50% Crit Rate before worrying too much about Crit Damage). For the chest, Attack% is stronger than flat Attack. Read more detail in our gear guide for beginners — it covers exactly what to keep and what to trash.

Shards and Summoning

You'll collect shards from various activities — campaign rewards, dungeons, clan chests, quests. There are four tiers: Mystery (grey), Ancient (blue), Void (purple), and Sacred (gold). The higher the tier, the better the potential pull.

As a new player the temptation is to open everything immediately. Try to hold your Void and Sacred shards for events that give bonus rewards for summoning during the event window. Plarium runs fusion events and champion chase events throughout the year where summoning gives you extra points toward guaranteed champion rewards. Opening shards outside those windows means leaving bonus value behind.

Mystery shards are fine to open whenever since they mainly give you food champions for levelling.

Daily Habits That Compound Over Time

The players who progress fastest in Raid aren't the ones who play the most in one sitting. They're the ones who log in consistently and complete their daily tasks every day without fail. The game's energy system means you hit a soft cap on progress per session, so frequency matters more than session length.

The habits that matter most in the first 30 days: burn all your energy on the best campaign or dungeon stage you can auto, do your Clan Boss attacks every day, run your Arena battles every day, and collect all your daily quests and missions before they reset.

Those four things done consistently every day will put you ahead of players who grind for three hours one day and skip the next five.

What Day 30 Looks Like

If you've followed this for a month, here's roughly where you should be: Kael at six-stars with decent gear, a second or third champion approaching five-stars, clearing Dragon 10 to 12 on auto, doing meaningful Clan Boss damage every day, and sitting somewhere in Bronze or Silver in the Arena.

That's a solid position. You'll have enough of a roster to start thinking about your second major champion, and the dungeon drops will start giving you gear quality that actually makes a difference.

The game opens up significantly from here. The first 30 days are about building a foundation that makes everything else go faster. Don't skip the boring parts. Play Raid for free and check how much of this you already have figured out.

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