Raid: Shadow Legends explained: affinities, roles and how a squad works

Most of a Raid: Shadow Legends fight is decided before it starts. You choose five champions, and those five bring a fixed set of affinities, roles and Speed values with them. This guide explains those three systems — what they are, how they interact, and what that means when you are picking a team. It does not rank champions and it does not quote drop rates, because neither can be checked independently.

Raid: Shadow Legends is a turn-based collection RPG published by Plarium. You build up a roster of champions and send five of them at a time into the campaign, into dungeons, into the arena against other players’ defence teams, and — if you join a clan — against the Clan Boss.

It runs on Android, iOS and PC, and an account carries your progress between them. It is free to download, and it sells optional in-app purchases. The exact age rating and purchase information for your region are shown on the store listing you install from; read them there rather than taking our word for it.

Battles are fought by a squad of up to five champions. Champions are levelled, geared and ranked up individually, so your roster is a pool you draw from rather than a single fixed team: you pick the five that suit the fight in front of you and leave the rest on the bench.

In practice that means a first squad usually wants something that can survive being hit, something that can heal or cleanse, and at least one champion whose job is simply to do damage. Spreading your resources across a dozen half-finished champions is the most common early mistake; one finished squad clears far more content than ten unfinished ones.

Every champion belongs to one of four affinities: Magic, Spirit, Force or Void. Three of them form a loop. Magic is strong against Spirit, Spirit is strong against Force, and Force is strong against Magic. Void sits outside the loop entirely: it is neither strong nor weak against anything, and nothing is strong or weak against it.

Affinity matters because attacking with the advantage can produce a stronger hit, while attacking into a disadvantage can produce a weakened one that lands for less. The exact modifiers and the names the game gives those hits are shown in the in-game help; we have not reproduced numbers here that we cannot verify.

The practical consequence is simple. Dungeons and boss fights have a known affinity, so a roster with all four affinities covered lets you always field the favourable side of the loop. Void champions are the safe default when you do not know what you are walking into, precisely because they never take the bad side of it.

Separately from affinity, every champion has one of four roles: Attack, Defence, HP or Support. The role tells you which of the champion’s base stats is highest and, as a rule, which stat its skills scale from — which in turn tells you what gear to put on it.

Role is not the same thing as job. Plenty of Support champions do real damage, and plenty of Attack champions carry a useful debuff. Read the skill descriptions: they tell you which stat a skill multiplies, and that is what actually decides how you gear the champion.

Champions also come in rarities, from Common up to Legendary. Rarity mainly governs base stats and how strong the skill kit is; it is not a promise that a rare champion is useless. A well-geared common-rarity champion with the right debuff will out-earn an ungeared legendary every time.

Turns are not taken in a fixed left-to-right order. Every champion on the field fills a turn meter, and the rate it fills at is set by that champion’s Speed stat. Whoever fills the meter first takes the next turn.

This is why Speed changes a fight more than raw damage does. A faster champion simply gets more turns, which means more debuffs applied, more heals landed and more chances to act before the enemy does. It is also why turn-meter manipulation — skills that fill your own meter or drain the enemy’s — is so valuable: it rewrites the running order mid-fight.

You can play the whole game solo, but joining a clan unlocks co-operative content. The best known of it is the Clan Boss: every member runs their own squad against the same boss, the damage is pooled, and the rewards scale with what the clan manages between them. It is the clearest reason to build a second squad once your first one is finished.

The game is free to download and can be played without paying. It funds itself through optional in-app purchases — energy, shards, packs and subscriptions — and it advertises heavily. Some of those purchases are random-reward items: you are buying a chance at a champion, not a champion.

Decide what, if anything, you are willing to spend before you install, and turn on your device’s purchase controls if the account will be used by a child. orvanti.online is intended for an adult audience and we do not publish spending advice.

Everything described above is a mechanic the game documents in its own in-game help and on the publisher’s official pages. We have deliberately left out drop rates, tier lists, “best champion” rankings and player-count figures, because we cannot verify any of them from a primary source — and an unverifiable number is worse than no number.

The four illustrations on this page were drawn by us. They are not screenshots and are not taken from the game. If something here is wrong or out of date, write to info@orvanti.online and we will correct it — our editorial policy explains how corrections are handled.