New Dungeon! Artifact Ascension! Raid Shadow Legends

They’ve only done it again!

Plarium has previewed a brand-new feature coming to the game in the very near future, giving us the ability to enhance our artifacts even further through Artifact Ascension!

Let’s take a look at Plarium’s video, detailing this new feature…

What is Artifact Ascension?

Welcome to our new Update Preview, where we’ll be highlighting Artifact Ascension.

Hear the name and you’ll automatically think of Champion Ascension, and you wouldn’t be far off, while there are obvious differences between Champions and Artifacts, the core idea is the same.

Drawing out the latent power of your artifacts to make you stronger!

With Artifact Ascension, each Artifact you ascend will receive additional stat bonuses.

To do this, you’ll need to spend a new resource called Oil, which you can think of as somewhat similar to affinity potions, minus the affinity matching.

Oil is available in a brand new dungeon, and nowhere else – You gain access to this feature at level 38, however, it is geared towards upcoming endgame content which will really ramp up the difficulty.

Of course, this feature will not affect current content that you’re already clearing with ease except for speeding them up, making the ability to farm new Artifacts and Accessories a quicker task!

Accessories are currently not available to ascend, however, they will be in the future!

How does it work?

Let’s get into the mechanical side of this new feature and how it actually works…

Artifacts MUST be at least Rank 4 and be upgraded to level 12 if you would like to ascend them, and their rarity is irrelevant (You could even ascend a common artifact if you wanted to!)

The Oil required for ascension comes in 3 types:

• Lesser (Ascension levels 1-2)
• Greater (Ascension levels 3-4)
• Superior (Ascension levels 5-6)

Like with Champion Ascension, the stars on your Artifact will change from gold to purple as you ascend them further.

This feature will not require silver or any other resource besides oil.

Once an Artifact reaches ascension level 1, it gains a single bonus stat, and each ascension level after that increases that specific stat.

Each Artifact Type has a set pool of bonus stats that it can have which you can view in the table below, however, at present, there is no way to reroll this bonus stat, unfortunately.

And that’s the basic idea and mechanics of Ascension covered!

The Sand Devi’s Necropolis!

Time to dive into where to acquire the resources for this new feature, the brand new Dungeon!

The Necropolis’ guardian, the mighty and terrible Al-Naemeh the Sand Devil, is quite different from your average boss in Raid: Shadow Legends, but before we get into that you should know that he will ignore your defenses, and can withstand almost any attack… but, he likes napping on the job…

Unlike Raid’s other bosses, the Sand Devil is susceptible to Sleep, and using this debuff will be crucial to send this devil to his eternal rest.

First of all, we’re going to cover the passive skill:

Rest for the Wicked 

Al-Naemeh is immune to receiving all debuffs except [Sleep]. Also immune to HP exchange effects, HP balancing effects, cooldown increasing effects, Turn Meter reduction effects, and debuff duration increasing effects.

When under a [Sleep] debuff, Al-Naemeh is only immune to receiving [Stun], [Freeze], [Provoke], [Block Active Skills], [Block Passive Skills], [Fear], [True Fear], and [Petrification] debuffs. as well as HP exchange effects, HP balancing effects, and cooldown increasing effects.

Decreases incoming damage from enemy skills by 25% on stages 1-5, by 50% on stages 6-15, and 75% on stages 16-25.

This innate damage reduction is decreased by 10% for each debuff that Al-Naemeh is currently under.

Because of this passive you’ll need to place as many  debuffs as you can whilst the boss is asleep, however unlike usual, he won’t wake up instantly when hit whilst under a sleep debuff, he will instead gain a Slumber Counter.

The Slumber Counter ticks down each time you hit the boss, and he will wake up when the counter hits 0 or the debuff wears off, the amount of stacks on the Slumber Counter vary per stage.

• Stage 1-5 = 10 Stacks
• Stage 6-15 = 7 Stacks
• Stage 16-25 = 5 Stacks

When the boss wakes up from being asleep, you can’t immediately sleep him again, he will gain immunity to sleep for 1 turn after waking up, so you really need to utilize the opportunity to debuf him when you can.

Soul Sustenance [Passive]

Whenever Al-Naemeh attacks, destroys the MAX HP of all targets by 10%.
Whenever an enemy decreases Al-Naemah’s Turn Meter, destroys the MAX HP of that enemy by the same percentage.

Whenever Al-Naemeh is under a [Sleep] debuff and an enemy Champion is healed, restores a portion of that Champion’s MAX HP. The amount restored is equal to the value of the heal.

This is another nasty passive that the boss has, making it nearly impossible to run Champion’s such as Coldheart as your damage dealers.

Now let’s take a look at the active skills of the boss:

Rage of the Sands
Attacks all enemies. Places a 30% [Decrease SPD] debuff and a 50% [Decrease ACC] debuff on all enemies for 2 turns.

This debuff can be resisted, so make sure you have enough resistance to avoid this debuff, as you do not want to avoid being able to place debuffs during the short available windows, especially when you see the next skill…

Dune Tempest
Removes all debuffs from Al-Naemeh, then heals him. The amount healed is proportional to the total amount of destroyed MAX HP on the enemy team.
After healing, attacks all enemies.
The damage this skill inflicts decreases for each removed debuff.

This skill makes landing debuffs in sleep windows even more crucial, to remove the amount of damage you receive from this lethal AOE attack, so you are really going to have to think about this fight, and potentially may be one that requires manualling at first!

The final skill that we’ll be dealing with is yet another AOE attack…

Feasting Swarm
Attacks all enemies, Ignores [Shield], [Block Damage], and [Unkillable] buffs, as well as 100% of the target’s DEF.
After attacking, places a [Sleep] debuff on Al-Naemeh for 2 turns.
Passive Effect
Increases the current cooldown of this skill by 1 turn whenever a [Sleep] debuff is placed on Al-Naemeh by enemies.

And there we have it, even more synergy with sleep which truly shows the importance of it for this encounter, having a Champion who can reliably and consistently place Fear will be imperative to your success in this, especially Champions such as Siphi the Lost Bride who is able to place it with her A1 and it cannot be resisted!

Let us know what you think of this upcoming content release in the comments below!