Best Crowd Control Champions in RAID: Shadow Legends
Discover the best crowd control champions in RAID: Shadow Legends. Learn which champions can stun, freeze, provoke and control enemies.
What Crowd Control Means in Raid
What Crowd Control Does
Crowd control refers to abilities which prevent enemies from taking a turn, or from using their useful abilities.
Why Crowd Control Is Important
CC is essential to beating many fights in RAID, since preventing enemies from using their turns well is often the only way to survive at all. Several bosses can also be CCed, and in these cases such abilities are often essential to the boss strategy.
Note that for early-game content, you can beat nearly all of it without needing CC–but as you progress further and start taking on harder challenges, CC becomes essential to success.
Expect CC to often be the most important role in wave-based content such as Cursed City and in PvP modes like Arena.
Types of Crowd Control in Raid
Hard Crowd Control
By hard CC we mean debuffs which can prevent your opponent from taking a turn at all (or drastically limits them to the point where it’s fairly equivalent). These include:
Provoke and Block Active Skills will still allow enemies to A1, but they are hard locked into it. Block Actives is noteworthy in preventing mythical from metamorphing, making it much stronger now than it would have been a few years ago.
Soft Crowd Control
By soft CC we mean buffs, debuffs, or effects which don’t prevent your opponent from taking a turn, but which drastically limit their ability to do anything useful. These include:
- Enfeeble
- Increase Skill Cooldown
- Taunt
Enfeeble does nothing if the champion doesn’t rely on landing a hit, Increase Skills can be countered by mythicals metamorphing, and Taunt forces a specific target but doesn’t prevent use of active abilities.
Crowd Control Adjacent
There are also buffs, debuffs, and effects which can substitute for CC in some cases, but which are not directly strong enough to be considered proper control or are “setups” for it. These include:
- Decrease Turn Meter
- Block Passive Skills
- Seal/Master Seal
- Ensnare
- Fatigue
- Stormcall
Best Areas to Use Crowd Control
PvE Waves
Waves are rounds in PvE content, such as Dungeons, Doom Tower, or Faction Wars where you are fighting regular champions (i.e. non-boss enemies).
These waves are nearly always vulnerable to CC, and for the hardest waves CC will be almost essential to taking them down.
Certain Boss Fights
Bosses are typically immune to CC since it is so powerful.
There are a few exceptions however:
- The Head of Decay in Hydra Clan Boss can be Provoked. This is essential to prevent him Removing Debuffs from the Hydra.
- The Sand Devil in the Dungeons can be put to Sleep. This is the standard way to beat him, allowing you to delay his dangerous attacks and to succesfully place debuffs.
- Tauraze in Grim Forest can be Frozen, preventing him from attacking your team or from gaining turn meter.
- Boss minions, e.g. spiderlings, are often vulnerable to CC even if the main boss isn’t. This can make those encounters significantly easier.
These are just a few examples; whenever a boss is vulnerable to a CC effect, you can expect it to be a key effect to look for in your team.
PvP – Arena and Siege
Control is absolutely central to PvP strategies, with some of the very best champions in the game filling this role.
In short, PvP is won by damage dealers killing the enemy team. Support champions protect and enable them; control champions attempt to stop both these roles (and enemy control champions as well!) from doing their job. This is the key trinity of arena strategy; a team of 4 damage dealers might easily be beaten by a 2-man team of one damage dealer and one control champion.
Best Crowd Control Champions in Raid
Here we’ve listed 10 of the most best Ally Protection champions in RAID: Shadow Legends. This list is not exhaustive, but it should steer you in the right direction for knowing what makes these types of champions so powerful! Check out our Champion Tier List for more info.
Gnarlhorn
Gnarlhorn is an incredible rare MVP for control, bringing an AoE Provoke on a 3-turn cooldown. This is not an attack, meaning that it is affinity friendly! This makes Gnarlhorn a fantastic consistent option who is easy to pull and book–you can even run two Gnarlhorns for some teams. Don’t sleep on this champion; he’s one of the few “must build” rares in the game.
Ethlen the Golden
Ethlen is one of the more underrated champions in the game since he is a relatively new epic who flew under the radar. He’s special in being a hybrid damage dealer, who brings control as his secondary role (his self-buffs make this easy to do). The big draw for Ethlen is he is one of the few good Block Active Skills champions in the game, a great debuff which can prevent mythicals from metamorphing on top of preventing all champions from using regular skills.
Criodan the Blue
Criodan is a fantastic epic champion who is dedicated to the Freeze debuff. This debuff is a good CC effect, with the niche use of being the only way to prevent the Hard difficulty Fire Knight from taking turns. On top of this, Criodan brings an Apothecary-style speed boost, fitting in well to most team builds in the game.
Armanz the Magnificent
Armanz is infamous for providing an obscene amount of CC–to such a degree that many players quit the game due to the frustration of fighting him in Arena. He’s fallen off a bit since then due to the prevalance of the Wand of Submission Relic and the Mercurial gear set, but Armanz can still AoE Stun an entire enemy team while stealing all their turn meter at the same time–a nasty move which sets him up with loads of turn meter, potentially cycling back to the move again before the enemy has recovered, catching them in that frustrating chain of CC.
Hilvi the Rime-called
Hilvi is the partner champion to Tormin and is an amazingly versatile champion. She can Remove Buffs and Freeze on the same attack, reliably letting her place her CC even on enemies with Block Debuffs buffs. She is also a full team reviver and turn meter booster, letting her fulfil a variety of roles in the team and work with either a super fast or go-second build.
Tormin the Cold
Tormin is the partner champion to Hilvi, and is a CC machine when paired with her. His passive is where most of his Freezing comes from, with a solid chance to Freeze enemies whenever they gain turn meter or buffs. This makes him a nightmare to deal with for unprepared teams who can get caught in a constantly frozen chain. Hilvi turns him into a machine-gun, drastically increasing the amount of attacks he can make!
Bayek
Bayek was a time-limited champion from the Assassin’s Creed crossover event. He has an incredible passive for PvP, preventing low ACC enemies from landing crits, on top of a mountain of other great buffs, debuffs, and damage output. He is a fantastic Provoke champion, with the potential to land 2-turns of Provoke on enemies with 3 or more debuffs, making him particularly adept at Hydra Clan Boss or wave-based content too.
Lord Entertainer Fabian
Fabian is infamous for being Armanz 2.0, being an Anniversary Fusion who is a PvP monster focused on CC. Fabian is a True Fear machine, but it’s his Increase Skill Cooldowns A3 which is so impactful, countering a huge amount of meta champions in PvP. Watch out for mythicals who can Metamorph to get access to more active skills, or for champions in Chronophage set which can block this ability from Fabian.
Night Queen Krixia
Krixia is essentially an upgraded version of Fabian, Removing Buffs and Increasing Skill Cooldowns. As a mythical, she can ignore a portion of the enemy’s RES, with the downside that it is much harder to get a good soul for her. Her biggest advantage is that she has access to an Alternate Form with Decrease Skill Cooldown for her team: this can set up her team for a dominant win; or help her to counter other “lockout” champions like Fabian.
Sabrael the Distant
Sabrael is the newest and hottest Increase Skill Cooldown champion, bringing it in a reliable double-hit form. She can then follow this up with another double hit which Steals all buffs, or swap to her Alternate Form for a massive AoE double-hit nuke instead. With 4-hits in a row, Sabrael is an insane counter to Mercurial gear, which is defining the PvP meta at the moment.
How to Build Crowd Control Champions
ACC Requirements
Landing debuffs or negative effects in RAID nearly always relies on beating the enemy’s RES stat with your ACC stat. You should aim for 25 ACC more than the enemy has RES. For example, Dragon Normal Stage 20 has 200 RES, so you should aim for 225 ACC.
Check out our Raid Stages Tool to see the RES and ACC requirements for almost any fight in the entire game!
SPD Requirements
SPD is the other key stat for control champions. Unlike standard debuffs, control debuffs usually only last for 1 turn despite having equally long cooldowns. Therefore you will want to build very high SPD on these champions to rotate through their skills as quickly as possible in order to maintain maximum uptime.
SPD is particularly important for PvP content, since the player whose CC champion goes first is usally at a massive advantage. Players will often build control champions in the fastest gear on their entire account. Speed boosters are the only type of champion who might get higher priority on SPD gear, since they can reach higher potential SPD in realistic builds due to not needing to build any ACC.
In PvE, you should still build high SPD but you can balance it out with more defensive stats or versatile gear sets.
Recommended Artifact Sets
Any sets which increase SPD or ACC are the perfect choice for control champions.
Cooldown reduction sets such as Reflex or Impulse are very useful for PvE content, where there is less of a desperate need for SPD.
In PvP, Supersonic or Mercurial are top-tier sets which provide SPD alongside incredibly powerful effects.