RAID: Shadow Legends is a very popular gacha game that offers hundreds of different champions, lots of character customization options, and a satisfying progression curve that keeps the challenge interesting regardless of your level. However, beneath this seemingly simple and derivative design lies a game with a surprisingly intricate gearing system, especially once you get to the endgame.

RAID: Shadow Legends Champion Gear Guide for Beginners - Everything You Need to Know About the Gear (Updated June 2022)

The gearing process in RSL involves many different pieces of gears that can each increase certain attributes. Furthermore, these pieces can be upgraded to increase the bonuses that they confer. However, with such variety, how can we know which pieces to equip? Additionally, how can we know that the gear that we’ve received are the best possible options for a specific slot? In this guide, we aim to answer some of the most common beginner questions about the gear in RAID: Shadow Legends, as well as to give a basic explanation of how this system works.

Before we start, however, make sure to read up on how to play RAID: Shadow Legends on PC with BlueStacks, as our Android app player gives you many tools and features that can help to automate the grind, and even help to obtain the best characters from the beginning!

Obtaining Pieces of Gear

Gear, or artifacts as they’re known in RAID: Shadow Legends, can be obtained through several methods. However, the most common will be via completing campaign fights, which have a chance to drop specific pieces of gear depending on the chapter and the stage number. Each chapter has a chance of dropping a piece from a specific set, while each stage has a chance of dropping a specific piece within the said set. For instance, stage 1 in any chapter always drops weapons, and the corresponding set will depend on the chapter, with chapter 1 granting HP sets; stage 2 ATK sets, and so on.

RAID: Shadow Legends Champion Gear Guide for Beginners - Everything You Need to Know About the Gear (Updated June 2022)

Another way to score the best gear in RSL is via dungeons, which are unlocked fairly early in the game. However, these are much, much harder to farm, as well as more expensive in terms of energy costs. Feel free to check out our RSL starter guide to learn more about farming gear.

Lastly, another source of gear in this game is the Market, which has a few random pieces that rotate regularly. These pieces can be of a varying rank and rarity, and are generally not worth it most of the time. Still, it’s worth taking a look every day to see if there’s anything of note.

Gear Rarity, Star Rank, and Stat Growth

The rarity of your gear in RAID: Shadow Legends is more than just for show; it also bestows your pieces with more stats. The said rarity is color-coded and includes, in ascending order of rarity, common pieces (gray), uncommon pieces (green), rare pieces (blue), epic pieces (purple), and legendary pieces (orange). The rarity of your gear is important since it will determine the number of substats available from when you first get them at level 1. Case in point, the lowest rarity gear, common pieces, have only a primary stat and no substats, while a legendary piece will start with a primary stat and four substats unlocked from level 1. 

RAID: Shadow Legends Champion Gear Guide for Beginners - Everything You Need to Know About the Gear (Updated June 2022)

It’s pretty obvious from this fact that the higher the rarity, the better the gear, right? Well, not necessarily. You see, while the rarity of an artifact will, indeed, affect the number of substats, and therefore the amount of bonuses it can provide, the potency of these bonuses will be determined by the gear’s star rank. As such, the higher the star rank of a piece, the better its base stats, and the more significant the stat upgrades every time the piece is leveled up. In this sense, star rank is perhaps more important than rarity, especially early on. In fact, a 5-star uncommon piece can often be better than a 1-star epic piece.

Now, while rank is important for the stat gains, rarity is nevertheless very important for min-maxing your gear. As we mentioned above, the number of actual substats on a piece will depend on its rarity. For example, epic gear starts with three substats unlocked at level 1, and increasing it to level +4, +8, and +12 will level up one of those substats at random, while upgrading it to +16 will unlock the fourth and final substat. Meanwhile, common gear starts with no substats, and leveling it up to +4, +8, +12, and 16, will instead unlock new substats at each turn, though they will be inherently weaker since they won’t be upgraded like in higher rarity gear.

RAID: Shadow Legends Champion Gear Guide for Beginners - Everything You Need to Know About the Gear (Updated June 2022)

In our starter guide for RAID: Shadow Legends, we mentioned that legendary gear is the best when it comes to pure performance. However, it’s also the most difficult and expensive energy-wise to farm. Fortunately, the epic pieces that you can get from farming campaign stages in brutal difficulty will be almost as powerful since they can get just the same bonuses, minus one upgraded substat (the one unlocked at +16). For this reason, epic gear will be your workhorses for the vast majority of your time in RSL, while the legendary pieces you get from dungeons will be more of an endgame objective.

Gear Type and Substats

Now, when it comes to actually choosing the pieces of gear, we need to get more specific. Sure, we now know that 5-star epics will be some of the best gear you’ll get through most of the game, but how do you know which pieces to actually use and upgrade? Well, the answer is twofold as it doesn’t depend on the gear itself, but also on the champions that you’re looking to outfit. We’ll talk about the latter in another section, so let’s focus on the former here.

RAID: Shadow Legends Champion Gear Guide for Beginners - Everything You Need to Know About the Gear (Updated June 2022)

Weapons, shields, and helmets all have the same flat primary stat. Case in point, weapons can only have flat Attack; helms can only have flat HP, and shields can only have flat Defense. However, the other pieces of gear are more unique and are therefore a bit more difficult to choose:

  • Gloves in RAID: Shadow Legends are the only pieces of gear that can have either Critical Damage or Critical Rate as their main stats, which makes them ideal for DPS champions or for heroes whose sole purpose is to farm and clear stages, and simply to do the most damage possible.
  • Meanwhile, the chest piece is the only piece of gear that can have a Resistance or Accuracy primary stat. Nevertheless, in practice, chest gear is often used mostly for its HP% bonuses, to increase the durability of tank champions, or for their ATK% primary stat, which they can also have, to boost the DPS of offensive champions.
  • Finally, Boots have the particularity of being the only type of gear that can have Speed as their primary stat, so its most common use is to increase this attribute, though it can also have HP%, ATK%, and other percentage boosts, instead.

RAID: Shadow Legends Champion Gear Guide for Beginners - Everything You Need to Know About the Gear (Updated June 2022)

There are also accessories, though these are a tad more complex in terms of unlocking and acquiring them, so we won’t talk about them here.

Gear Set Bonuses

While this aspect is fairly self-explanatory, it warrants its own section just because of how important it is when it comes to gearing your champions in RAID: Shadow Legends.

Set bonuses are, as its name implies, bonuses that you get when equipping multiple pieces of the same set—two and four, to be exact. The good thing here is that you can actually mix and match sets to get various bonuses, depending on what the champion needs. As such, you could equip two pieces of one set, and four of the other, or perhaps two pieces of three different sets to activate the first tier of bonuses. 

RAID: Shadow Legends Champion Gear Guide for Beginners - Everything You Need to Know About the Gear (Updated June 2022)

However, some sets actually require you to equip four pieces to get the best bonuses. One of these sets is the lifesteal set, which actually gives the 30% lifesteal bonus at four pieces. This means that you need to pick wisely which sets to equip your champions, always keeping in mind that you need to pay a hefty fee to unequip them without having to destroy them.

How to Correctly Gear Your Champions

While it’s quite easy to just pick the strongest pieces of gear and stick them on your champions, the actual way to properly gear your characters will vary according to the champions themselves. In this sense, you must read their skill descriptions to see what stat is used for their damage scaling, and focus on increasing the relevant stats via gear. Offensive champions that scale on ATK will need to build this primary stat, and secondarily work on increasing Critical Damage, Critical Rate, Speed, and other useful attributes via their gloves, chest, and boots. This stat preference will vary according to the aforementioned skill scaling, but also according to the role that you want your champion to perform.

It’s difficult to know how to build a champion, at least in terms of gear. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that you can’t unequip gear unless you pay a silver fee, or outright destroy the piece. Many gamers have complained about this limitation, but it actually makes sense when you consider how easy it would be to defeat other players in PvP if you could just freely unequip your gear and equip other pieces to hard-counter the other team. Needless to say, this limitation is here to stay, and players have learned to play around it.

RAID: Shadow Legends Champion Gear Guide for Beginners - Everything You Need to Know About the Gear (Updated June 2022)

Luckily, there’s a great way to know how to build a champion from very early, which is found in the Index menu. This screen is a catalog of every single champion in the game, which you can freely consult at any moment. It gives you a glimpse of how every champion looks, as well as a look at their abilities. But more importantly, it also lets you check their attributes at max level, which sheds light on how they will perform once they’re maxed out. 

Knowing a champion’s stats when they’re at max level is important because it will give you an idea on what pieces of gear to equip, and whether to go for flat boosts or % bonuses to get the most out of your characters. Moreover, knowing what stats and substats each piece of gear can possibly have will determine the best possible item for every slot, regardless of whether you’re looking to build a tank or a DPS. Finally, while a champion’s stats and stat growth is pivotal, their scaling is also important, as bumping up the correct stat will increase their performance considerably.

Special Champion Considerations

While the gearing process is relatively straightforward for the most part, at least once you learn about the different stats and substats, there are still some champions that are special and require a different approach. In these cases, users often write guides dedicated exclusively to these characters, and it’s better to actually consult some of these if you want to get the most out of them. In fact, this goes for most of the high-end champions in RAID: Shadow Legends, since the metagame is quite intricate and complex, and goes beyond just equipping the right gear. Your best bet for this is to google the champion’s name, and you’ll likely find several guides from many players.

RAID: Shadow Legends Champion Gear Guide for Beginners - Everything You Need to Know About the Gear (Updated June 2022)

There are things like grinding for gear with a specific primary stat versus getting a similar stat boost as a substat; gearing heroes that scale with more than one stat, or grinding for legendaries versus settling for epics in terms of energy expense and gem costs, to name a few. RAID: Shadow legends can get a lot more complex than it initially seems, and the only way to get a real feel on how to proceed is by interacting with the community and watching other pro players. Regardless, this guide should serve you as a valuable starting point to gearing and equipping your champions.

With all these factors in mind, you’re now ready to start building and gearing your own champions in RAID: Shadow Legends. Feel free to share your own builds and team setups in the comments below!