What Decrease Skill Cooldown Does in Raid: Shadow Legends

In this guide, we explore the power of Decrease Skill Cooldown in Raid: Shadow Legends. Learn how this valuable effect helps Champions cycle back to their strongest abilities faster, which Champions provide it most effectively, and where you’ll get the most value from using it across PvE and PvP.

How Decrease Skill Cooldown Works

Decrease Skill Cooldown is a powerful way to help Champions cycle back to their strongest abilities faster. Reducing cooldowns can give your team quicker access to damage, buffs, debuffs, heals, revives, and other key skills, allowing them to be used more often throughout a fight.

Cooldown reduction can also work in many different ways. Some Champions reduce or completely reset the skills of the entire team, while others target a single ally or only affect themselves. There are also Champions who reset specific skills when certain conditions are met, such as killing an enemy with the ability they just used, allowing them to use it again on the following turn.

Unlike effects placed on enemies, Decrease Skill Cooldown doesn’t require Accuracy. It can provide value almost anywhere, helping you repeatedly use strong skills to clear PvE waves, cycle back to important abilities in PvP, or gain faster access to your strongest damage and support skills against bosses to maintain your strategy and speed up the encounter.

Wave Content

Decrease Skill Cooldown can be incredibly valuable for wave based content, helping Champions get back to their strongest abilities faster between each wave of enemies. This can make runs more consistent while also speeding up clears by reducing the time spent waiting for key skills to become available again.

It can also help enable faster team setups such as Poison Explosion or Seer style compositions. These teams rely on specific abilities being available for each wave, whether that’s placing and activating Poisons or setting up buffs for Seer to remove with Karma Burn. Cooldown reduction helps reset these key skills between waves, allowing the same setup to be repeated throughout the encounter.

Bosses

It can also be strong against bosses by helping your team regain access to key damage, support, and debuff skills faster. This can be especially valuable in areas like Hydra, allowing you to quickly cycle back to effects such as Provoke when the Head of Decay respawns, or regain important debuffs to control newly spawned Heads when you’re taking them down quickly.

Arena

Both Increase and Decrease Skill Cooldown can be strong in Arena, depending on your team setup. Decreasing your own cooldowns can help you cycle back to your strongest damage, control, or defensive skills faster, making it difficult for enemies to deal with your key abilities repeatedly if they’re unable to keep your Champions under control.

Here we’ll be highlighting some of the best Champions in Raid: Shadow Legends capable of decreasing skill cooldowns, showcasing the strengths they bring. This isn’t a complete list, so be sure to check out our Champion Tier List for other options.

Build Focus

Building Decrease Skill Cooldown Champions depends on the wider role they fulfil within your team. The cooldown reduction itself does not require Accuracy, so you can focus entirely on the stats each Champion needs to perform their other roles effectively.

Support Champions such as Kymar, Yumeko, or Pheidi will generally benefit from high Speed, accuracy and strong survivability, helping them cycle back to their cooldown reduction or reset skills more often. For Champions that also bring debuffs, damage, or other effects, build towards the stats those parts of their kit require, whether that’s Accuracy, offensive stats, HP, DEF, or Resistance.

Recommended Artifact Sets

Artifact Sets should generally focus on helping your cooldown Champion take turns faster and regain access to their reset or reduction skill. Speed, Impulse, and Mercurial are strong options for increasing Speed, while sets like Reflex and Merciless can help reduce their own skill cooldowns and allow them to use their key abilities more frequently.

For dedicated buff focused support Champions, Protection can provide strong defensive stats alongside protecting any buffs they place, while Stoneskin can be valuable in PvP to help them survive the opening enemy rotation. Survivability sets such as Guardian or Immortal can also be considered where keeping the Champion alive is the priority.

For Champions that also bring important debuffs, sets such as Perception, Pinpoint, or Feral can provide the Accuracy needed for those effects while offering additional useful stats. However, Accuracy is only needed for these other parts of their kit and is not required for Decrease Skill Cooldown itself.

There are also options such as Relentless when looking to gain Extra Turns for stronger self cycling. Chronophage can be another option, building Immutable stacks to help protect against having their own skill cooldowns increased.

For damage dealers such as Ninja or Galleus who manipulate their own cooldowns, offensive sets like Savage, Lethal, or Merciless are strong choices. These allow them to maximise their damage while their kit handles the cooldown cycling needed to regain access to their strongest attacks.

• Time Your Cooldown Reduction – Make sure your key abilities are already on cooldown before using a reset or reduction skill, otherwise you may waste its value.
• Consider Your Turn Order – Have your main Champions use their strongest abilities before your cooldown Champion resets them, allowing them to immediately start cycling those skills again.
• Use AI Presets – For wave based teams, presets can help ensure cooldown skills are used at the correct time, especially in Seer or Poison Explosion teams where specific abilities need to be ready for each wave.
• Build Around the Champion’s Role – Decrease Skill Cooldown itself doesn’t require Accuracy, so focus on the stats needed for the rest of their kit, whether that’s Speed, survivability, damage, Accuracy for debuffs, or Resistance.
• Take Advantage of Self Resets – Some Champions reduce or reset their own cooldowns when conditions are met, such as killing an enemy. Setting them up to trigger these conditions can greatly improve their skill cycling.
• Cycle Key Boss Skills Faster – Use cooldown reduction to regain important damage, debuff, healing, or control skills against bosses. In Hydra, this can help bring Provoke or other key debuffs back in time for newly respawned Heads.
• Consider Cooldown Artifact Sets – Sets like Reflex and Merciless can provide additional cooldown reduction, while Relentless can grant Extra Turns to help Champions cycle naturally through their skills faster.
• Protect Your Cooldown Champions – In PvP, cooldown Champions can become priority targets due to how much value their resets provide. Keeping them alive and free from control can allow your team to reuse its strongest abilities before the enemy can recover.
• Remember Not Every Reset Works the Same – Some Champions completely reset skills, while others reduce them by a set number of turns or only affect themselves or a target ally. Build your team and turn order around exactly how their cooldown effect works.