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Ever wanted to test your teams’ power against that of other players in RAID: Shadow Legends? With the Arena, you can.
In the Arena, you can fight other players’ Arena team that they’ve put as their defense team.
Fighting in the Arena comes with more benefits than just getting to fight other players’ teams.
The rewards that you get from the Arena are great and are extremely important to your progression in the game.
Recommended Read: RAID: Shadow Legends Champion Tier List
In this guide, we give you all the information you need on the Arena in RAID: Shadow Legends, from the rewards you get to what the best champions, teams, and stats are for increasing your chances of victory.
Table of contents
What is the Arena
The Arena is the PvP system in RAID: Shadow Legends, where you can fight other players’ teams.
PvP isn’t live, however, which means that when you are fighting another player in the Arena, you are fighting a team they’ve put together from their roster of champions playing on auto-mode.
You yourself can play on manual mode, which often leads to an advantage for you.
There are two types of arenas within the Arena menu – Classic Arena and Tag Team Arena.
The Classic Arena, which is unlocked from the start of the game, is where you fight one team of champions against one other player’s team of champions.
The player who manages to take out all the opponent’s champions before losing all of their own is the winner.
In the Tag Team Arena, which is unlocked at player level 35, you have to bring three teams of champions, who will then be fighting against three teams your opponent has built.
Teams fight each other one after each other in the Tag Team Arena. First, your first team fights the opponent’s first team, then your second team two fights their second, and lastly, your third team fights their third.
The player who won at least two of the three sub-matches wins the Tag Team Arena match.
When you win or lose a match in the Arena, your Arena rating rises or falls. Your Arena rating determines what tier you’re currently in.
Here are the different Arena tiers in RAID: Shadow Legends:
- Bronze I
- Bronze II
- Bronze III
- Bronze IV
- Silver I
- Silver II
- Silver III
- Silver IV
- Gold I
- Gold II
- Gold III
- Gold IV
- Gold V
- Platinum
The Gold V and Platinum tier only exists in the Classic Arena, not in the Tag Team Arena.
What Arena tier you’re currently in determines both the power of your opponents as well as the rewards that you get from fighting in the Arena.
How to fight in the Arena
To fight in the Arena in RAID: Shadow Legends, click the red BATTLE button in the bottom-right corner of the Bastion, click the Arena menu, choose either Classic Arena or Tag Team Arena, select an opponent, click Battle next to their team, make your own team, and click the Start button.
Inside an Arena match, you can use skills just like when you’re fighting stages of enemies in other parts of the game.
Your goal is to take out the opponent’s champions before they take out yours.
Arena matches are not live, which means that the opponent’s team plays on auto-mode, while you can choose to play on manual mode, giving you a bit of an advantage.
As many teams revolve around one champion, at least early on in the game, you can increase your chances of winning by focusing on that one. The opponent might not do that, as they’re playing on auto-mode.
You need Arena keys to fight in the Arena. Every match costs one Arena key to start. The Classic Arena and the Tag Team Arena use separate keys.
The Classic Arena uses the yellow Arena keys, while the Tag Team Arena uses the green keys.
Classic Arena keys are passively regenerated at the rate of one key per hour with a maximum limit of 10. You should, therefore, spend your keys if you have more than 10. Tag Team Arena keys are fully restored daily.
You can see both the exact composition of champions and the team power of the various opponents in the Arena before you choose to fight them.
As arena keys are valuable, try only to choose opponents that you know that you’re going to win against.
Many players use the strategy where they put only one weak champion on their defense to ensure they lose some Arena rating every day, which will get them to a lower tier and thus give them easier opponents. You can fight these teams for free wins.
If you’ve beaten all the opponents that are weaker than you in your current list of opponents, use the Refresh List button in the top-right corner to get a new list of opponents.
You can refresh your list of opponents for free every 15 minutes, so don’t spend the 5 gems to refresh it early.
The last thing you need to do in the Arena is to set your defense team through the Defense tab on the left side inside the Arena.
There are two overall strategies to build your defense team. Either build one that is powerful or one that is extremely weak.
Which of the two you want to use depends on your current tier in the Arena. It’s great to be in a lower tier so you can face easier opponents, but you don’t want to fall down to a lower tier where you get fewer medals per win.
You can check out how many medals you get in each tier by clicking the Tiers tab on the left side inside the Arena.
Towards the end of the ranking period, you want to have reached as high a tier as possible to get the best chest, in which case you should use a strong defense team.
You get the chest from the highest tier you’ve reached in the season, not the one you’re in at the end of the period.
When the current ranking period ends is shown at the bottom-left corner inside the Arena. The ranking period lasts one week, resetting every Monday.
Arena rewards
You can earn several useful items and resources by fighting in the Arena, which is why we recommend that you do it from the beginning of the game.
Here are the different rewards that you get from participating in the Arena:
- Medals
- Materials
- Gold Bars
- Tier chests
- Tier stat boosts
You receive Medals if you win matches in the Classic Arena. There are three types of medals – Bronze, Silver, and Gold Medals. Medals are needed to unlock and upgrade boosts in the Great Hall.
The number and type of medals you get from matches depend on your current Arena tier.
Magisteel is another reward that you get from winning matches in the Classic Arena. Magisteel is a material that you need to craft artifacts in the Forge.
When you win matches in the Tag Team Arena, you get Gold Bars as a reward. You can spend Gold Bars in the Bazaar, where many useful items are sold, including Shards, Skill Books, and Chickens.
The number of Gold Bars that you get from a match in the Tag Team Arena depends on how many of the three sub-matches you win. The higher the tier that you’re currently in, the more Gold Bar each sub-match gives.
Every time the ranking period ends in the Classic Arena, you receive an Arena tier chest based on your current tier. The higher the tier you’re in at the end of a ranking period, the better a chest you’ll receive.
You can see when the currently running ranking period ends in the bottom-left corner inside the Arena menu.
Having a high Arena ranking and thus being in a high tier comes with another benefit – tier stat boosts.
By being in a tier, your entire team gets a +% HP, ATK, and DEF boost in all areas of the game, not just the Arena. The higher the tier that you’re in, the better the stat boost.
Best stats for the Arena
The most important stat in the Arena is speed. Being faster than your opponent so you can attack before them is crucial.
In the Arena, you can do extremely well by focusing on speed and ensuring that you get one or several moves before the opponent can even touch your champions.
Unlike later in the Campaign and against bosses, battles don’t last that many rounds in the Arena.
The only time where you might experience a prolonged battle in the Arena is if both players bring very tanky teams with lower damage outputs.
If you’re not going for a quick bursting team, then you, of course, also want to focus on your defense stat and accuracy rather than just speed. But even with a non-bursting team, speed is still incredibly important.
Unless you’re at the end-game of RAID: Shadow Legends, we do, however, recommend that you focus on speed and bursting down the enemy before they even get a chance to attack you.
Focusing on speed will yield the best results for most players in the Arena, and by doing so, you’ll be able to farm the Arena faster as well.
More diverse teams that aren’t purely speed and burst-focused make more sense to build much later in the game, where Arena matches become more diverse and can be much longer.
Depending on your team, accuracy is also an extremely important stat to build, just like it is everywhere in the game.
Best champions for Arena
The best champions to use in the Arena early on in RAID: Shadow Legends are those with powerful AoE attacks and those with ally turn-meter + speed increase buffs.
You want to use these types of champions early on in the game, as you can easily create an incredibly powerful Arena team that’ll allow you to farm wins quickly.
Check out the next paragraph for more details on the AoE and turn-meter + increase speed buff setup.
The specific champions that you want to use early-game in the Arena that suit the burst + speed setup include:
- Kael
- Athel
- Galek
- Elhain
- High Khatun
- Apothecary
- Warmaiden
The first four champions are the starter champions in the game, so you should have one of them. Of the four, Kael is the best, but all four can be used as powerful AoE bursters.
The last three champions listed can be obtained quite easily. Apothecary and Warmaiden are both rare champions, and Warmaiden can even be obtained from chapter 9 in the Campaign. High Khatun is the 30th-day login reward.
Any other champion with a powerful AoE skill will be a great fit for an early game Arena team too.
High Khatun or Apothecary is for filling the turn-meter of allies and giving them a speed buff at the start of the match, while Warmaiden is for decreasing the defense of enemies.
In the end-game of RAID: Shadow Legends, the following champions are among the best to use in the Arena:
- Duchess Lilitu
- Prince Kymar
- Candraphon
- Nekhret
- Hegemon
- Siphi
- Rotos
- Warlord
Obtaining these champions is no easy task, but if you manage to do, you’ll be able to create some very powerful Arena teams.
Best team setups for Arena farming
The best team for the Arena in RAID: Shadow Legends at the beginning of the game all the way till late-game is running a speed + burst setup.
A speed + burst team setup consists of:
- One turn-meter + increase speed buff champion
- Two or three strong AoE burst champions
- One or zero AoE decrease defense champion or another attacker.
To make this setup successful, you need to build as much speed as possible on your turn-meter + increase speed buffing champion to make sure they move first.
If you choose to use a champion that has AoE decrease enemy defense, it should also be built to be as fast as possible. It needs to move before your AoE-bursting champions.
Your attacker champions that should have at least one strong AoE skill each for this setup to work should also have built speed, but you don’t have to focus entirely on it. They will get their speed boost from your buffing champion.
It’s more important that they have enough damage to throw out a hefty attack in one move.
In battle, the speed + burst setup works in the following way:
To make sure your champions move in the right order, you need to build the right amount of speed on each one. The one with the most speed moves first.
Until much later in the game, that’s what many Arena fights will look like. Of course, if you run this setup and fight someone with 50% higher team power than you, it’s unlikely that it’ll go like this.
However, if you fight opponents with a team power similar to you, then chances are you’ll easily beat them, making you able to farm the Arena and its rewards effortlessly and quickly.
If you don’t wish to build champions specifically to buff your team in the Arena like High Khatun and Apothecary, then you can just use powerful AoE bursting champions that you have built tons of speed on to give them a good chance to move first in battle. This will achieve similar results and will allow you to farm the Arena easily through most of the game.
In the end-game, where opponents will have full teams of maxed out legendary champions that do well in the Arena, battles become a bit more complex.
At that point, more setups become viable to run as well, like tanky teams with provoking all enemies or setup teams where you buff one champion greatly before it one-shots enemies.
Other attributes like unkillable buff and having the ability to revive allies become increasingly important later in the Arena as well.
Here are some examples of powerful end-game teams to use in the Arena:
Team 1
- Warlord
- Arbiter
- Ramantu
- Leorius
Team 2
- Prince Kymar
- Leorius
- Nekhret
- Hegemon
Team 3
- Siphi
- Duchess Lilitu
- Warlord
- Candraphon
All of these teams are created by top players in RAID: Shadow Legends that hover around the top of the leaderboards in the Arena.
That’s everything you need to know about the Arena in RAID: Shadow Legends!
Have any input or suggestions for this guide? Let us know in the comment section below.
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