Game systems in RAID: Shadow Legends — turns, affinity, stats and masteries

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The turn meter: why Speed is king #

RAID does not use a fixed turn order. Every combatant has a turn meter that fills continuously, at a rate set by its Speed stat. When a meter fills, that combatant acts and the meter resets to zero. Everything else in the combat system is built on top of this.

Five horizontal bars filling at different rates, one per champion, with a dashed line marking the threshold at which a champion takes its turn. — Turn order is a race between meters, not a queue. **Original diagram** produced for zlatora.online — not a product screenshot.

Two practical consequences. First, Speed is not a quality-of-life stat, it is a combat stat: more turns means more damage, more healing and more debuffs. Second, any skill that fills your own meter or drains an enemy’s is effectively a skill that steals turns, which is why champions with those abilities hold their value for years.

This is also the source of the genre habit known as speed tuning: building a team whose Speed values are deliberately spaced so that champions act in a fixed, repeatable order. It is fiddly, it involves arithmetic, and for a certain kind of player it is the best thing about the game.

Affinity: a three-way cycle plus a neutral #

Every champion and every enemy has exactly one affinity. Magic, Spirit and Force form a cycle: Force beats Magic, Magic beats Spirit, Spirit beats Force. Void is neutral — it has no strength and no weakness against the other three.

Three circles labelled Magic, Spirit and Force in a triangle with arrows showing each is strong against the next, and a grey Void circle set apart, marked neutral. — Attacking into a weak affinity risks the hit being resisted; attacking into a strong one can force a critical hit. **Original diagram** produced for zlatora.online — not a product screenshot.

Because a stage’s enemies usually share an affinity, checking it before you commit a team costs nothing and changes outcomes. Void champions are valuable precisely because they never suffer the penalty, which makes them safe choices for content you have not scouted.

The stats, and what each one is for #

The stats you will be balancing on almost every champion. Exact formulas are not published by the publisher; the descriptions below are functional, not numeric.
Stat	What it does	When it matters most
Speed (SPD)	Fills the turn meter faster, so the champion acts more often.	Always. It is the most contested stat in the game.
Attack (ATK)	Scales damage on attack-based skills.	Damage dealers whose skills scale from attack.
Health (HP)	Total hit points; also scales some skills and damage formulas.	Tanks, and damage dealers whose skills scale from health.
Defence (DEF)	Reduces incoming damage; also scales certain skills.	Survivability against hard-hitting bosses.
Critical Rate (C. RATE)	Chance for a hit to be a critical hit.	Any damage dealer — usually pushed towards its cap first.
Critical Damage (C. DMG)	How much extra damage a critical hit does.	After critical rate is reliable; before that it does nothing useful.
Accuracy (ACC)	Decides whether your debuffs overcome enemy resistance.	Debuffers in dungeons and late-game content.
Resistance (RES)	Chance to block incoming debuffs.	Arena defence and content that stuns or freezes your team.

A common beginner trap

Critical Damage is worthless without Critical Rate. Building a champion to high critical damage while its critical rate sits at a third means most hits do not benefit at all. Raise critical rate to something dependable first, then add damage.

Accuracy against resistance: the invisible dice roll #

Debuffs — lowering an enemy’s defence, stunning it, preventing it from healing — are the backbone of most successful teams, and they are not guaranteed to land. Whether a debuff sticks is decided by your Accuracy against the target’s Resistance. Enemy resistance rises sharply in higher dungeon levels and late-game content.

This is why a debuffer without Accuracy is a decoration. It is also the most common reason a team that clears stage nineteen of a dungeon falls apart on stage twenty: nothing about your damage changed, your debuffs simply stopped landing.

Try the systems in practice

The fastest way to understand turn order and affinity is twenty minutes in the campaign. The download is free.

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Skills, cooldowns and books #

Champions have two to four active skills, each with its own cooldown measured in turns, and some have passive abilities. Skill upgrades — applied with items commonly called books — reduce cooldowns or raise the chance of a skill effect. For some champions the difference between an unbooked and a fully booked kit is the difference between usable and excellent, which is worth knowing before you spend scarce books on the wrong target.

Levelling, ranking up and ascension #

Three separate upgrade tracks apply to every champion, and it is easy to confuse them:

Level — raised by feeding other champions as experience fodder, or by running campaign stages.
Rank — raised by sacrificing other champions, which raises the level ceiling and base stats.
Ascension — consumes elemental potions farmed from specific content and unlocks the later skills in a champion’s kit.

The practical point: a champion is not “finished” at maximum level. Rank, ascension, skill books, gear and masteries are all separate investments, and a half-invested Legendary is usually weaker than a fully invested Rare.

Masteries #

Each champion has a mastery tree with three branches — offensive, defensive and support — unlocked with a resource earned by battling. Mastery choices are meaningful: some nodes add flat damage, others add sustain, and a few change how a champion plays entirely. Because the resource is slow to earn, pick the champions you are confident about before spending it.

Gear and set bonuses #

Six gear slots and three accessories. Matching pieces from one set grant an additional effect; the number of pieces required varies per set. Original diagram produced for zlatora.online — not a product screenshot.

Gauntlets, chestplate and boots roll a main stat, which is the single most important property of a piece: boots with Speed as the main stat are worth more than almost any substat combination elsewhere. Upgrading a piece re-rolls its substats, which is where the game’s deepest resource sink lives.

What to prioritise, in order #

Speed on boots, and Speed substats wherever you can get them.
Reliable critical rate on damage dealers before critical damage.
Accuracy on debuffers before anything else on them.
Enough survivability to finish the fight — not more.
Full investment in a few champions rather than partial investment in many.

Where to check

Every mechanic above is described in the game’s own help screens and in Plarium’s support centre. Where our description and the publisher’s differ, the publisher’s is authoritative — game systems are rebalanced regularly.

Put it to work

Free download on mobile, Windows and Mac.