How to Build Control Champions in RAID: Shadow Legends

Learn how to build control champions in RAID: Shadow Legends. Discover the best stats, artifact sets, and gearing strategies for Stun, Freeze, Provoke, Fear, and crowd control champions.

What Crowd Control Does

Crowd control refers to abilities which prevent enemies from taking a turn, or from limiting their usage of their stronger 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.

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:

1. Stun
2. Sleep
3. Provoke
4. Fear/True Fear
5. Freeze
6. Petrification
7. Sheep
8. Block Active Skills

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:

1. Enfeeble
2. Increase Skill Cooldown
3. 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:

1. Decrease Turn Meter
2. Block Passive Skills
3. Seal/Master Seal
4. Ensnare
5. Fatigue
6. Stormcall

Why Accuracy Is Usually the Most Important Stat

Crowd control effects must land consistently to be effective.

Your ability to land control depends on how your ACC stat compares to the enemy’s RES stat: if your ACC is equal to the enemy’s RES, you will have around a 90% success rate; if your ACC is 100 lower, you will only have a 10% success rate.

ACC requirements increase dramatically in endgame content, especially when fighting other players in PvP modes if they focus on building high-RES champions.

ACC is the most important stat for a control champion by far–if you can’t land your CC effects, then your CC champion has failed their role in the team.

Why Speed Is Critical for Control Champions

Taking turns frequently allows champions to maintain control effects.

A high SPD stat allows you to place your control effects before the enemy takes a turn, and it also helps you cycle back to your control more quickly, thereby maximising the amount of time you keep enemies controlled.

This makes SPD the second most important stat to ACC.

Most control champions need to focus solely on ACC and SPD to achieve success!

Core Control Sets

Basic sets for these champions include:

• Perception
• Speed
• Accuracy

These sets boost the core stats of ACC and SPD.

Advanced Control Sets

Advanced control sets include:

• Relentless (take more turns, therefore land more CC)
• Reflex (shortens cooldowns, therefore land more CC)
• Stone Skin (survive initial turns in PvP)
• Supersonic (cut in and take turns sooner in PvP)
• Feral (boost team damage when landing debuffs)
• Mercurial (survive against enemy damage and effects in PvP)

These sets usually provide such powerful effects that they are stronger than the basic sets once you’ve managed to collect strong pieces of them.

As you can see, some lean towards PvE usage whereas others are essential for PvP.

Crowd Control Artifact Sets

Some special sets give champions the ability to land control effects through attacks:

• Stun (low chance to land Stun)
• Provoke (low chance to land Provoke)
• Daze (low chance to land Sleep)

These sets are decent supplements for wave-based content such as Faction Wars or Cursed City, though their low chances to land make them unreliable. They are particularly good on fast champions who have regular AoE attacks, which maximises their chances to trigger.

Best Blessings

Blessings such as Intimdating Prescence, Temporal Chains, or Polymorph are the standard choices for control champions, since they compliment the role.

For lower rarity control champions, there are few good choices. Cruelty is an OK epic option which reduces enemy DEF.

Check out our Blessings Tier List for more info.

Best Relics

Any relics which boost SPD or ACC–or give extra turns–are good choices.

Some examples are:

• Mind of Marquat (Mythical)
• Temporal Stagnator (Legendary)
• Perched Shadow (Epic)
• Molten Deathbell (Rare)

Check out our Relic Tier List for more info.

Best Gemstones

Any gemstones which boost SPD or ACC–or give extra turns–are good choices.

Some examples are:

• Torpidity (Mythical Square)
• Puppetmaster (Legendary Circle)
• Gathering Momentum (Legendary Diamond)
• Targetfinder (Epic Circle)

Check out our Gemstone Tier List for more info.

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:

1. The Head of Decay in Hydra Clan Boss can be Provoked. This is essential to prevent him Removing Debuffs from the Hydra.
2. 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.
3. Tauraze in Grim Forest can be Frozen, preventing him from attacking your team or from gaining turn meter.
4. 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.