How to use AREA Bonuses in RAID Shadow Legends
Since the addition of Live Arena and the changes around the Great Hall, many players have been left wondering how best to progress their Area Bonuses, so today we’re going to dive into Area Bonuses and how we’d recommend you tackling your upgrades from an early game and late game perspective, to get the most out of your Live Arena Medals.
What are Area Bonuses
Much like the Original Great Hall, now known as Affinity Bonuses, Area bonuses are stat boosts that you can upgrade by spending your hard-earned Live Arena Crests from Live Arena wins, unlike Affinity Bonuses these won’t boost your Champions everywhere however, as the name suggests, Area Bonuses will enhance your Champions in specific areas of the game.
The areas that you can upgrade are as follows:
- Potion Keeps
- Ice Golem’s Peak
- Fire Knight’s Castle
- Dragon’s Lair
- Spider’s Den
- Hydra Battles
- Demon Lord Battles
Each of these areas is split into 3 grades, 1-3, and each tier will cost more to upgrade, Potion Keeps are Grade 1, and are completely useless – do not upgrade these.
The 4 Dungeons are Grade 2 and will be more expensive than Potion Keeps to upgrade, however, will give you much more benefit.
Finally in Grade 3, there is Clan Boss and Hydra Clan Boss – These are the most expensive to upgrade, but will yeald you the biggest rewards because of the stat requirements in these areas.
The Stats that you can enhance are as follows:
- HP (2% – 20%)
- ATK (2% – 20%)
- DEF (2% – 20%)
- Ignore DEF (2% – 20%)
- SPD (2 – 20)
- C.DMG (3% – 30%)
- RES (8 – 80)
- ACC (8-80)
Each Stat upgrade can be upgraded 10 times, for each different area, gaining more of the stat at each level, until the maximum amount is acquired.
Upgrading these stats works the same as Affinity Bonuses in the fact that different medals are used to upgrade different levels:
- Bronze – Level 1-3
- Silver – Level 4-6
- Gold – Level 7-10
Early Game Strategies
For a new and progressing player, there are certain areas where you’ll find more benefit upgrading early on, compared to others, to allow you to reach the important milestone levels easier, and you may find a greater benefit upgrading lots of stats to lower levels rather than pumping all of your resources into one stat.
Priority Areas should be as follows:
- Demon Lord – ACC/HP/DEF (Potentially Speed) – This will allow you to push to Ultra Nightmare Clan Boss sooner to get you the best possible daily influx of shards and books to progress your account.
- Dragon’s Lair – Dragon is the MOST important Dungeon in the early game for artifacts.
- Spider’s Den – Spider is by far the hardest dungeon for early-game players so extra stats will give you more leeway when it comes to progressing here.
- Fire Knight’s Castle – After Spider and Dragon, the next Dungeon you will want to farm will be Fire Knight, so enhancing your Champions capabilities here will help you a ton going forward!
Late/End-Game Strategies
For most players who have pushed past the early stages of the game and have begun their journey in the late-end game, the areas that you will be focussing here will be areas that you’re struggling with/the areas with the highest stat requirements, most notably, Hydra Clan Boss where your Champions will need significant amounts of Speed, Accuracy and Resistance, as well as survival stats and damage where necessary, it can be a handful and quite taxing on gear requirements – These will significantly help that.
Priority Areas should be as follows:
- Hydra Clan Boss – as mentioned above, the requirements for later levels of Hydra can be quite hard to build on Champions who require lots of different stats, so pushing your Area Bonuses will ease those requirements.
- Fire Knight’s Castle – Fire Knight is the most farmed End-game Dungeon for artifacts because of the sets that it drops, namely Savage, it is also the hardest of the Stage 10 Hard Mode Dungeons, so increasing your Champions stats in Fire Knight will be very valuable.
- Speed Running – In terms of Speed Running Dungeons, the value you gain from upgrading your Ignore DEF will be massively beneficial, as we’ve seen from the addition of Blessings, Crushing Rend increases our damage by HUGE amounts at a high awakening level, so don’t sleep on upgrading your Ignore Defense stat.
Where will you be upgrading first? Let us know in the comments!
So what are the recommended stats to upgrade first for Hydra?
I’ve went with speed, ignore defense, crit damage, Defense and HP.
Do we know yet how many points if any using badge gives during CvC?
No. They may give points, or they may not. I’d suggest saving until we know.
Any indication if we’re going to get CvC points for badges yet? Have you still been saving them for the past year? I bet finally using all those will feel better than finding a $100 bill in your winter coat pocket if they end up awarding points for badges after saving up for the last year+!
I’ll invest to take c damage to 3 in CB while I’m still in Bronze and then move on to leveling FK ignore def to help my Seer out. Then once she can oneshot 25 I’ll move on to some Hydra stats.
Does the optimiser account for area bonuses? I just added speed to clan boss and wonder if I need to account for this on my own when speed tuning teams.
Would be good to see this updated now factoring in for newer players where they should priotise between Clan Boss, Dungeon, Doom Tower, Hydra, Cursed City and Faction Wars progression. This article seems to be made before some of these extra areas were added into the great hall
I feel like faction wars is a great place to put points no matter where you are in the game.
1) It’s someplace that beginning players need to progress on, and it’s a pretty big time and resource commitment. Saving time and being able to farm stage 21 with level 50 champs that maybe have a mix of 12/16 stat gear is HUGE for early players.
2) For end game/min-max players, you probably have to run to run it daily if you want your best gear to have maxxed stats. For example, you can get 8 extra speed per piece of gear. If you are running speed boots, that’s an extra 40 speed. For nukers/hp/def champs that maybe you wish you could put non-speed gear on, you can get an extra 45 speed with max glyphs — the same as a 6* speed boot. Obviously, this goes for other stats as well (40% extra hp, 40% extra atk).
3) Time: Even with good gear, your run times might be around 2-3 minutes per stage, maybe more for a couple of factions you don’t have the best comp. That is 4-6 runs per day depending on if it’s 2 or 3 factions which can add up. That’s potentially 10-20 minutes a day depending on the situation.
4) Area Bonus is cheap compared to everything else. Upgrading a single hydra stat to rank 3 costs about the same as upgrading everything in FW to level 2.
Upgrading my FW has halved the times for many of my FW teams. I had a couple of frustrating 4-5 minute teams that now only take 2 minutes. Many of my 2-3 minute teams only take 1 minute. I have a couple sub 1 minute teams too. The 5-10 minutes I save every single day farming something I really don’t want to deal with has been worth it for me. I’m not at level 10, and I’m probably done with FW area bonus for now. I think upgrading at this point will get diminishing returns.
I’m sure there are people/whales/kraken sitting on hundreds of 6* glyphs and don’t run FW. For those people… You probably don’t need area bonuses anywhere in the game…