RAID Shadow Legends: Building a Strong Arena Defence

There are 3 different types of PvP Arena content in RAID Shadow Legends. Classic, Live, and Tag Team. Understanding how to properly handle defence in each of these arena modes is crucial for success, and functions differently than doing well on offense.

Classic and Tag Team are very different from Live Arena, because you won’t be fielding a passive defence, instead you’ll be an active participant in every single battle that affects your rank.

There is a strategy that revolves around setting up weak defenses in Classic or Tag Team Arena, as a way to maintain a certain rank tier that makes it more realistic to farm at a high win-rate. This can be beneficial in certain scenarios because it will save time and effort, while also possibly being more efficient with a much higher win rate compared to fighting in higher tiers where you’re much weaker.

Another common strategy that pertains to defense, is fielding an extremely weak defense during the week, and then bolstering defense to be very strong as the game heads into the weekend closing in on when the Arena reset will occur. This can allow the player to drop down a little bit for easier fights and a higher win-rate, while also making sure they drop too far because they can maintain or climb back up during the weekend before reset happens. Since arena fights cost tokens to participate, it can make sense if done properly, to maximize the win-rate and total resources acquired by these tokens by properly managing your defense and rank. These strategies tend to be a little bit more common in the higher tiers like Gold, as opposed to Bronze and Silver, where people are more concerned with being able to gain access to the highest tier for upgrading their Great Hall.

Keeping up with the defence section of your battle history can be a very useful tool. It enables you to see a couple of very important points of interest:

1. How often your defence is being selected for attack by opponents
   1. If your defense is being constantly attacked, it could be a sign that it’s doing a poor job at deterring opponents from attacking you.
2. What kinds of teams your defence does well / poor against
3. 1. This can tell you if certain affinities, certain champions, or certain PvP strategies are destroying your defence. Which will help you shift to trying other strategies that may perform better overall.

Something else that is very interesting to observe from the defence match history, is how players adjust when attacking you multiple times. Since the match history shows us the account name of who attacked you, you’re able to see if they tried to beat you again after losing to you, and what adjustments they made. This can be extremely powerful information for you to obtain because it gives you insight into what other people consider strong options for countering you.

The way that classic and tag team arena fights function in RAID Shadow Legends, is that the attacker has to defeat every single champion in order to win. This means that for your defense, you don’t need to worry about a time limit, or even if you’re able to technically win a fight. For example, if an attacker challenges your defence for 15 minutes and gives up, that’s a successful win for your defence team and a loss for your attacker. This means it can be a strong strategy to just go for an insanely tanky annoying team that doesn’t even have an interest in killing anything. Since you’re not actually present for the fight yourself, you don’t need to care how long the fight takes or anything like that.

Another way to think about defence is that your defence team doesn’t technically even need to fight to be considered successful. If your defence simply strikes fear in attackers, to the point where they would rather just skip over you in favour of fighting other opponents, that’s a form of a successful defence. This can be accomplished by using champions that are assumed to be strong by most players, or by inflating your team power numbers to the point where opponents will look for lower-rated defenses to attack.

If your goal is to accomplish a very high defence team power rating number, there are a few things to consider.

• The team defence score does not take into account synergies like Machichka + Taras, it simply adds up all of the individual champion power ratings.
• Resistance is usually the biggest return on stat vs power rating for champions. So if you want a high power rating for your team, put champions that have high resistance.
• Set bonuses are also considered in the champion power rating, so try to line up gear synergies.
• Very knowledgeable players will not be fooled by this, as they will notice if a team isn’t as strong as the numbers indicate, but it can be a powerful tactic overall for deterring people from attacking you.

There are typically 2 different team archetypes overall when it comes to building a PvP Arena team.

1. The speed team is designed to go first and snowball an advantage by going first and getting more turns.
2. The tanky is team designed to go second and slowly widdle the other team down.

If you want to go with a speed team as your arena defence, the team will look something like this:

1. Extremely fast turn-meter booster who goes first
2. Buff Stripper
3. Debuffer to enable your damage dealer
4. Damage dealer to nuke down all opponents with big AoE

Some examples of strong champions for this style would be Arbiter, Lyssandra, Mighty Ukko, Lydia Deathsiren, Trunda Giltmallet, Baron, Madame Serris, Sun Wukong, Georgid the Breaker.

The advantages of this style are that it gives you quicker battles (which we don’t really care about for a defence team) and that it can scare opponents away because of being worried about trying to be faster than you. They may perceive you as a very strong player who’s confident that their defence will go first.

The disadvantages of this style are that it will require you to constantly be on your toes about maximizing the speed of your defence turn meter booster and that your defence is extremely predictable. There are a lot of speed team counters in the game, and your opponent could plan effectively against your defence if they have a diverse champion pool.

If you want to go with a tank team as your defence, the team will look something like this: 

1. High-resist support champion who can revive
2. Shielder or Tank that protects allies without needing an active turn
3. High-accuracy buff manipulator / debuffer
4. Sturdy damage dealer who can ideally block revive

Some examples of strong champions for this style would be Siphi the Lost Bride, Duchess Lilitu, Tormin the Cold, Ultimate Deathknight, Nekhret the Great, Mithrala Lifebane, Python.

The advantages of this style are that it will typically have a higher team power, which can scare people from attacking, and that it could be very annoying to deal with for your opponent.

The disadvantage of this style is that you’re basically surrendering first actions to your opponent, which leaves you vulnerable to things like being completely locked out if they have someone like Warlord or Yumeko.

Building, managing, and monitoring your arena defence can be an extremely powerful tool to progress optimally while also gathering knowledge about the game as you do so. Have fun with it and try out some different strategies. You can always refer to our HH Gaming RAID Shadow Legends Tier List to see our overall grades for how champions stack up against each other in not only the arena but other game modes as well!