Blessings 2.0 – New Recommendations and Champion Guide Updates

Update 8.20 introduced widescale changes to the blessing system in Raid: Shadow Legends. These changes resulted in many of the recommended blessings on our champion guides to become incorrect and for the past two months we have been hard at work to figure out the best way to recommend blessings going forward.

Today, we are pleased to announce an update to all champions guides with new and improved blessing recommendations.

Several blessings were reworked leading to previous recommendations such as Faultless Defence, a solution originally aimed at mitigating damage, to no longer apply in the same manner. In addition, blessings received wide scale stat adjustments resulting an all stats applying universally. This meant that our previous recommendations that were purely based on the stats provided by the blessing no longer applied.

The changes have had a significant impact on the Arena Meta, more than any other content, with many high-end players and creators showcasing that Polymorph was now the go-to option for Arena.

The challenge for us at HH Gaming when updating the blessing recommendation was attempting to create simple and clear recommendations without including significant amounts of additional information to explain our reasoning. A key aspect that our previous systems lacked is that many blessings in Raid: Shadow Legends evolve as you increase the awakening rank of your champions. Whilst some blessings can operate well across any awakened rank, other blessings are only viable if you reach a High (5-6) Awakening Rank or even requiring Rank 6.

Our previous system fell short of our high standards to correctly recommend the right blessing for your champions based on their awakened rank and the content you planned to use your champions in. Therefore, we took the time to develop a new system.

Our previous recommendations were inconsistent, subjective to the content and champions and could carry up to four different recommendations. Whilst this sounds great on paper and for simple champions would result in a good recommendation, it raised issues when more complex champions released and lacked the required detail to clarify usage depending on the awakening Rank.

With the update, we felt it was a good time to setup new recommendations with the goal of increasing consistency across all champions, to provide recommendations based on the awakening rank of your champions and to separate content into clear defined roles and content areas.

All of our champion guides now recommend up to 5 blessings with up to 3 recommended for Dungeon and Boss Content (PvE) and 2 recommended blessings for Arena Content (PvP). Blessings are separated into two primary categories:

1. 1-4 Star Awakening – These blessings are suitable when your champion is 4 star awakened or below and is tailored to the quality, impact and effectiveness of the blessings on those ranks.
2. 5-6 Star Awakening – These blessings are suitable when your champion is above 4 star awakened and typically considers the strength of the blessing when reaching these higher awakened states.

With a separation into awakened ranks, we believe this gives a more clear direction for your champion. In addition to these we have customised our system to flag certain blessings:

1. Team Blessing – These blessings are recommended in every team but only to a maximum of 1 per champion. This typically is due to the blessing either becoming inactive when paired with another in the same team or the effects they carry cannot stack on enemies. You can read more about Building a Team around Blessing here
2. 6 Star Blessing – These blessings should only be selected when your champion is 6 Star. This is because their effects are not sustainable for your champion unless at this final rank. If your champion is not at rank 6, we recommend you select the 1-4 star recommendation.

We have updated blessings to also take into account their required accuracy values therefore champions such as Ronda or Walking Tomb Dreng will recommend Brimstone but only as a 6 star. Both champions do not require accuracy to place their debuffs and Brimstone will require accuracy until Rank 6 meaning to enable the blessing you need to build inefficiently. We will continue to expand and monitor this list of exceptions as new champions release.

There are a number of blessings that can operate in very unique cases that are poor in overall usage but incredibly valuable when used in specific scenarios. For example, Faultless Defence provides a reflect damage when a champion is protected by Increase Defence. Reflecting damage in Raid: Shadow Legends is generally a weak choice to defeat your opponents and in most cases, this blessing will never give you the power you want to experience from blessings. However, the Fire-Knight Shield stacks, which you are required to reduce by hitting the enemy, will be reduced when you reflect damage. This makes Faultless Defence a great option to help defeat this challenging boss.

To correctly, account for these niche usages, champions who can take advantage of these situations will have a third Dungeon and Boss blessing recommendation with a clear label to identify where we recommend the usage and the blessing in question. A great example is Martyr, who places increase defence and Counter-Attack buffs on your team. When the Fire-Knight attacks, you will immediately reduce the shield stacks by 5 and then you can counter-attack, making this blessing and Martyr’s skills one of the best combinations to defeat any difficulty of Fire-Knight including Hard-Mode. This also works on any awakening level.

We will continue to include niche options for champions in places where specific blessings are powerful in one location but universally less viable.

With the rising importance of Area Bonuses, Live Arena is a calling for more Raid players than ever. In addition, there are many chasing Gold 1 in Tag Team Arena for their Ramantu Progress Missions and there are many stalwart raiders who continue to chase Platinum ranks in Classic Arena. Our previous system did not universally recommend blessings for arena and created an inconsistent experience in our champion guides.

Our new guides now have a toggle button where you can switch between Dungeon and Boss Blessing and Arena Blessing recommendations. These arena recommendations take into account the more extreme requirements of builds that you will create for arena and the current meta. You may notice quite a significant focus on Polymorph which is currently dominating the arena at the very top of the ladders but we also wanted to highlight the value of other blessings including Temporal Chains and Life Harvest.

Make sure you check your frequently used arena champions to see if they are using the correct blessings. There is a temptation to rush to Polymorph but this is not always the right choice following the change to the blessing!