Best Decrease Defence Champions in RAID: Shadow Legends
Looking for the best Decrease Defense champions in RAID: Shadow Legends? Discover the champions that boost your team’s damage by weakening enemies.
What Decrease Defense Does in Raid
How the Decrease Defense Debuff Works
Decrease DEF is a debuff that lowers the enemy’s DEF stat by 30% or 60%. You should always look for the big version of this debuff, as it is twice as strong as the small version (typically, the small version is only found on rares or weaker epics).
The DEF stat reduces direct damage taken by a significant amount, which means that the Decrease DEF debuff will make enemies take much more damage–especially for tough enemies whose DEF stats are very high.
Why This Debuff Is Important
For low DEF enemies like Demon Lord or Campaign, Decrease DEF is not overly important: these enemies don’t have much DEF to reduce in the first place.
However, for high DEF enemies like Hydra or Grim Forest bosses, Decrease DEF will dramatically increase your damage and is one of the first things you should be looking to include into any team build.
Why Decrease Defense Champions Are Valuable
Boosting Team Damage
Decrease DEF increases all direct damage dealt to enemies, which will boost not only your crit-based damage-dealers, but also the damage from things such as Warmaster masteries. This is a huge damage increase for most of the damage on your teams.
Faster Dungeon and Boss Fights
One of the most important things to optimise in RAID is your clear time in any farming content; you want to be able to clear any farm content as quickly and efficiently as possible to minimise the time you need to play every day and to complete events and tournaments in a timely manner.
Tips for Using Decrease Defence Champions
Apply Decrease Defense Before Attacking
It’s crucial to apply this debuff before your damage dealers take a turn. If enemies have Block Debuffs or Stoneskin etc., you will need to Remove Buffs to open them up to debuffs.
Combine With Other Debuffs
Decrease DEF is the first step to doing good damage to many enemies in the game. Look for Weaken debuffs, which provide a further 25% damage boost, to push things further.
The next steps after this are to find damage boosting buffs such as Increase ATK or Shatter, then to look for damage boosting gear sets like Feral or Protection.
Finally, certain highly valuable champions like Firrol or Bad-el can provide damage boosting passives as well. Stack all these things for maximum damage output.
Best Decrease Defense Champions in Raid
Here we’ve listed 10 of the most best Decrease DEF 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.
Warmaiden
Warmaiden is the classic budget Decrease DEF option, bringing it on an AoE at 100% chance on a short 3-turn cooldown. As a rare champion who is farmable from campaign, she is one of the easiest champions to book in the game. Warmaiden will likely form a core part of many players’ rosters until they pull more premium options much later in the game.
Stag Knight
Uugo
Mistrider Daithi
Mistrider Daithi is quite different from the other champions we’ve mentioned here because he is a damage dealer first and foremost. His A3 self-buffs are what let him perform his hybrid role so well, providing AoE Decrease DEF alongside tons of damage. He’s genuinely better than many older legendaries at this point in the game!
Deacon Armstrong
Lydia the Deathsiren
Lydia is the big reward for beating all of Faction Wars Normal difficulty, and she has stood the test of time as one of the best free champions ever released. Her combination of Decrease DEF, Weaken, Strengthen, and Increase SPD as void affinity on a 3-turn cooldown stands as one of the best moves in the entire game, cementing her value everywhere. She’s been particularly good against Chimera Clan Boss where her Fear A1 and Block Buffs A3 are also particularly relevant.
Odin Faefather
Odin stands out on this list since he is more PvP focused than most of these champion who tend to lean more towards PvE. Odin has a very powerful A2, Removing Buffs, and placing Decrease DEF and Stun on all enemies–a likely game-ending combo if it lands. He also has an insane passive, which regularly spreads Block Damage to his whole team, and he can deal respectable damage with his A3. He’s good in PvE too, but it’s in the Arena with his Aura that Odin truly shines.
Klaazag Keyhulk
Klaazag is effectively a new version of Lydia, stacking 4 key debuffs on his A2: Decrease DEF; Weaken; Decrease RES; Decrease ACC. He also brings an absurd A3, stacking protected (against bosses) Counterattack and Unkillable on all allies. He can even do some decent damage too! Klaazag has clearly been designed as an anti-Chimera and anti-boss specialist, and represents well the huge powercreep we save with void legendaries in 2025/2026.
Toshiro the Bloody
Toshiro is another rare example of a damage dealer who brings Decrease DEF. Unlike his compatriot Ninja, who only brings it single-target, Toshiro brings it as an AoE debuff. Like Ninja, he has incredible boss-killing damage due to his ramping ATK and HP stats and the combo with Lady Mikage, making him one of the best champions in the game for any longer boss fight, such as Hydra or Chimera.
Theodosia the Disgraced
Theodosia’s incredible Base Form usually draws the most attention, but her Alternate Form is an almost equally impressive support. This form brings Decrease DEF and Block Buffs with the highly unique effect of being protected in most situations–a crippling counter to nasty enemies such as Nais the Shadowthief. She can also Decrease SPD and even Destroy SPD, and she brings a sneakily powerful unique damage boost on her passive. For all these reasons, it’s common to see Theodosia dominating in top end PvE teams.
How to Build Decrease Defense Champions
ACC Requirements
The most important stat for these champions is ACC, since ACC is required to land debuffs.
The amount of ACC you need is dependent on your enemy’s RES stat: you should aim for around 25 ACC more than their RES.
For example, Dragon Normal Stage 20 has 200 RES; you want to build 225 ACC on your debuffers.
To check the ACC needed for any fight in the game, check out our Raid Stages Tool!
Speed Requirements
It’s essential to build good SPD on debuffers:
- You need to place debuffs before your damage dealers attack.
- You need to cycle through your turns quickly to maintain full uptime of your debuffs
Generally, debuffers should be amongst the fastest champions on your account–second only to pure speed boosters.
Recommended Artifact Sets
Any sets which increase ACC or SPD are great choices, such as Speed or Peception sets.
Feral set is often best-in-slot for support debuffers, giving a 5% damage boost per debuff at 9-pieces.
Other good sets are ones which give you cooldown reduction or extra turns, such as Reflex, Relentless, or 4-piece Merciless.