Is Raid: Shadow Legends in 2025 Too Hard?

Raid: Shadow Legends has always been a hardcore game with hardcore content. However, over the last few weeks we have seen an outcry from players that we haven’t seen so loudly before: “The game is too hard!”

In this article, we will break down the areas of the game that are causing this sentiment, and share our opinions on what does–or does not–need to change.

The Chaos Awakes Event Dungeon against Kurosa the Covetous is huge difficulty increase compared to previous Event Dungeons.

Particularly at the highest stages, the requirements are insane.

TEAM OPTIONS

One team option is to one-shot the boss by exploiting “surplus damage” through champions such as Sun Wukong or Siegfrund the Nephilim. This kills the boss in seconds, but it requires very specific champions with a ludicrous level of investment that realistically can’t be reached without spending thousands of dollars on the game.

The “more budget” team option is to one-shot the minions with Seer, then duo the boss with Geomancer and Vogoth. This requires epic champions, which is good, but these champions require equally massive levels of investment. Expect to need: 6-star souls; +4 empowerment; almost maxed out relics; end-game gear.

THE PROBLEM

Is it good design if the only way to deal with things is to one-shot them—in other words, to basically do everything to avoid dealing with them at all?

This highlights a bigger problem: it’s not that previous Event Dungeons were far easier in terms of their design, but rather that we were able to “cheese” them with Enemy MAX HP Damage or HP Burn Explosion teams; now that these teams are almost impossible to use, the true difficulty reveals itself.

It’s not a surprise to hear that many players are unable to clear higher stages of this Event Dungeon like they could with previous ones.

Faction Wars Hard has also been a source of frustration for many players.

Although Plarium stated that they carefully picked conditions for every Faction, many players have found that they are totally reliant on gear sets to even attempt many of them–the champions covering some conditions just don’t exist.

STAT WEIRDNESS

Original Faction Wars is very old content at this point, so one of the starkest difficulty jumps between the content is that enemies now have SPD: in normal mode, they have only their base SPD (typically around 100); in hard mode, they have SPD starting from around 150, scaling up to over 300.

A weirdness that persists into Faction Wars Hard is that enemies do not have any C.RATE% (I guess we have to wait for Nightmare Faction Wars in 3 years for that?) but they do have insanely high HP, ATK, and DEF: this means that Bomb champions (who don’t need C.RATE) and HP damage dealers are stupidly dangerous in a way that doesn’t reflect the rest of the game.

THE PURPLE BOSS

The most glaring example of difficulty weirdness is the Purple Boss.

The RNG of whether he flips buffs to debuffs, or debuffs to buffs, is extremely frustrating to players–compounded by the RNG of running Protection sets to try to stop it as well. A boss being so reliant on players having 9-piece Protection sets for multiple factions is just unpleasant.

Not to mention his massive HP pool and his ability to exchange HP with your team. The intent is clearly to burst him down before he swaps HP–but the requirements to do so due to his HP, SPD, and buff/debuff RNG are just far too high.

From our testing, the Purple Boss on Stage 14 is much more difficult than any other boss on Stage 21… And that’s just not right.

All this being said, at the end of the day the game needs to consistently challenge its long-term players. This is not a new game; this is a 5+ year-old game with many dedicated fans who have been grinding (or spending money) over the entire span.

New players don’t need new content (there’s already so much) but long-term players do.

Has the recent content been too difficult? Yes. But should Plarium shy away from creating difficult content? No.

It’s about finding the right balance.

DON’T EXPECT TO BEAT THE GAME IN A DAY

There’s no question that there are many difficulty issues in the game right now, but some of the problems are also self-inflicted.

Many players have a false expectation that they will beat all content as soon as it releases with minimal effort. If a player fails to easily clear content, it is not because they have played it incorrectly or because they simply need to grind the RPG systems of the game for longer to grow in power—no, the player can never be at fault, so it must be the game’s fault.

Such complaints are disappointing, because they distract from the real balance problems and undermine the players who are trying to highlight those to the developer.

HOPE FOR CHANGE BUT DON’T EXPECT IT

Hard content is good, it’s simply a question of balance–and to a large degree, the “balance train” is very unstable after all these years with so many new “carriages” tacked onto it.

Plarium have clearly decided over the years to err on the side of too difficult, and the bad news is that I don’t expect them to change or to fix it.

Ultra-Nightmare Demon Lord was crazy when it first came out (and let’s be honest: how many players would be able to discover and design Unkillable speed-tuning without using the internet?); Bommal and Scarab were totally busted in Doom Tower; Fire Knight Hard came out with almost no viable Freeze champions in the game; Amius was obnoxious in Cursed City.

And one thing all of those bosses have in common is that they never nerfed them or tried to improve the experience.

Are the Event Dungeon and Faction Wars Hard too hard? At the highest stages, yes, absolutely (as are most of the bosses mentioned above). But I think the best we can hope for is that the next Event Dungeon might be slightly easier.

But hey, maybe I’m a pessimist… Let us know what you think in the comments down below.