Raid: Shadow Legends is a popular mobile turn based RPG developed and published by ‘Plarium‘. This game came out in 2018. Now this game is popping up in so many places. Those annoying youtubers are promoting them and being sponsored by Raid. So with Raid popping up in many places it must be good… wrong! Let’s take a look.

Speaking of youtubers funny that we never hear them give an update or talk about how things are going for them in the game Raid: Shadow Legends. We wonder why… Anyway. We won’t waste time. The first thing you will notice that every time you log into the game a micro transaction will pop up in your face. Yes, every time you log in a deal is thrown in your face. Not just 1, 2, 3, literally at times it was 5 deals one after the other in our face. The developers are literally coming to your door as salesman one after another trying to get you to buy… at four different times in the day. That’s why we have our shotgun ready. So developers are REALLY after your money. Yes we understand that game design is a business. Plarium needs to make money like any other business. This is too much though.

The reason they come for your money so hard is because Raid: Shadow Legends is literally based on money. Sure the game is free but it’s clearly pay to win. We can literally say so much about this but many have huge problems with Raid: Shadow Legends and literally bashed this game… and for good reason. ‘The Gamer’ literally said on their website “Raid: Shadow Legends is absolute trash and we’re not afraid to say it”. It gets better as they then gave a paragraph explaining how essential spending real life money for success in this game is. They said, again on their website, “Are you stuck on a particularly difficult dungeon and don’t want to grind for more gear? Use your Visa! Do you need more silver to equip a new weapon, because for some reason that costs in-game currency? Break out the MasterCard! Are you dissatisfied with your rank in Arena against the teams boosted by other players and their credit cards? Then spend more money, or forever stay in the lowest ranks of “competitive” play, you filthy, poor casual”. This made us laugh but honestly this is true. Legit. 

Everything revolves around money, why? Because the game is so grindy that it makes you want to speed this up. Humans don’t like waiting. Lag makes people mad, a slow computer gets on our nerves etc. Everything in the game can be sped up… with money. You can buy all the silver you want. You can buy the gems. You can buy artefacts. You can buy champions. You can buy training slots. You can buy levelling up beverages. You can buy chicken which are used to rank up your champions. You can buy anything you need. It’s literally pay to win. If you and your friend start Raid: Shadow Legends at the same time but you are regular you with your comfortable minimum wage job while studying for example but your friend has a rich uncle who spoils him. In the first day of playing this game, you who is playing naturally will get some uncommon champions maybe a rare get to maybe level 10 (we forgot how fast you level up in the start) find some artefacts none good but it’s better than nothing. Your friend because he got lots of cash from his uncle can have a full level 60 squad of champions with some legendary champions and full mastery without having to face the minotaur. We aren’t joking! You can literally do it all in a day if you have enough cash. To give you an idea of how strong a legendary champion is here’s the order: common, uncommon, rare, epic, legendary. So just think about this.    

Let’s talk about this grind. Everything is a grind. Levelling up is done fastest when you repeatedly do some of the hardest campaign levels you can do over and over again. So set the speed to 2x and ‘auto’. You don’t even need to play really. This is harder because each action requires energy which you have a limited amount of daily unless you buy more with money. In order to ascend your champions you need to collect the respective potions (magic, spirit, force, void, arcane) which you get from fighting in the respective dungeons same way with campaign. To make it grindy-er these fights also cost energy and you need a combination of the potion of your champions type with arcane as arcane is needed to for all ascensions. This means more fighting. Also the dungeon types are open on different days. So for example the magic dungeon might be open on Mondays, spirit is open Tuesday, force is Wednesday you get the idea. There is lesser, greater and superior potions of each type but we will get into that later in the blog post for a serious reason. In order to get your champions mastery, you need to (you guessed it) fight again but this time against the minotaur in his dungeon. If you win you get scrolls. There’s three types of scrolls, basic, advanced and divine. The type of scrolls you can get it decided by the difficulty of the dungeon. So you can’t get red scrolls until you get real strong in the game to defeat the dungeon. Which means come back later until strong after lots of grinding to get that strong. You need 5-30 basic for the first set of masteries, 80-120 advanced for next set and 200-350 divine for the final set. If you get strong enough like we did you can face stage 15 which is a level 185 minotaur. You can win from 24-32 basic, 11-16 advanced, 6-12 divine. Hold up… it gets worse.

So quick maths to fully max out your masteries concerning the divine scrolls you need 200+350= 550. 550/12 (it’s based on chance, so you won’t get 12 all the time) = 49 rounded up. Your champion will need to do this 49 times to complete one branch and that’s not counting the basic and advanced scrolls since you go through the masteries in order, you must max out the basic first before moving to advanced before moving to divine. If we counted basic and advanced it would be 49+15=64. Notice we said ‘one branch’. You can do only two branches and both cost the same except for the second branch can’t have the final category so double it. 128-29 (the last category of the second branch) = 99. So basically 100 times. Wait, notice even earlier we said “your champion” and not your team. Every time you successfully complete a minotaur dungeon ONLY ONE champion of your team at RANDOM gets the scroll prize. So the first time you win Athel might get the 12 divine scrolls but the second time your Frostking might get the 12 scrolls and the third time might be your Coldheart. Get it yet? The developers, to increase the level of grind made it so that your whole team doesn’t get the prize but only one. So it’s 100 times per champion! So your full squad of 4 or 5 means 400-500 times of repeating the minotaur dungeon. Oh and each attempt in the dungeon at this level costs 14 energy and at profile level 54 (what we were) you only get 124 energy daily so that’s 8 (as a whole number) attempts with what you got. Yes energy slowly comes back during the day so you might fill up your energy three times in a day so lets say 24 attempts each day. That means to fully max out your team of 4 you will need 400/24=17 (16.6) days of nothing but minotaur dungeon to fully max out your squad. It gets worse! Remember that the amount of scrolls you get per win is based on chance. We said on the highest difficulty dungeon you can get between 6-12 divine scrolls. We high balled the amount in our maths to show you the shortest amount of time. If you get 8 or 9, or even 6 the it’s going to take even longer. IT GETS WORSE! When you start the game you aren’t as strong as we were, you would need to start at lower level dungeons which give lower amounts of scrolls. For example stage 8 you can get 8-12 basic and 1-3 advanced, divine isn’t available at this level. It is available at level 11 but only 1-3 divine scrolls. So it would take forever. This is the definition of grind. 

We mentioned chance in the last two paragraphs but here’s where the chance gets real bad and one of Raid: Shadow Legends big problems. They don’t give enough information concerning chance. The lesser, greater and superior potions are dropped at chance. There’s even a chance you won’t get potions at all but a beverage for levelling up etc. We don’t know the chance of the drop. They say the higher difficulty of the dungeon gives a better chance for a greater and superior potion but how much more? What’s the chance. Weirdly we have received more superior and greater from lower levels instead of the higher levels. That’s weird. Even the whole artefacts are base on horrible chance. When you complete a campaign it’s all chance what you get in terms of the level of it and what stats it has. The worst is fighting the giant spider dungeon for rings, amulets and banners. Whenever you beat the spider queen thing, it’s all chance if you get a ring, banner or amulet. It’s all chance what level you get. It’s all chance what faction you get it for. So if you wanted to get a 6 star banner for Athel it becomes a nightmare you can’t control as you might get a banner but it’s the wrong level or you finally do get a level 6 banner but it’s for the orc faction so Athel can’t use it. Plus getting level 6 is harder than getting level 4 obviously. We have tried numerous times to get a specific banner or amulet and just don’t get it regardless of the number of times we tried. Remember that all the time we try to get a specific item from the spider queen we aren’t doing the minotaur, so no mastery for us. The chance gets worse in Raid: Shadow Legends. Shards is the main way to get champions. The type of shard has different chances for getting certain rarity of champions. Let’s focus on what matters here. When using an ancient shard you have a 0.5% chance of getting a legendary champion. 0.5%!! This means 1in 200. That’s like having 200 cards on a table face down and only one of those cards is the winning card. This game allows double of champions from shards so you can sacrifice to level up abilities. So after you pick a card, the whole table is shuffled with that same card back in the deck for you to pick again. Now if you use the sacred shards which is the main way to get legendary champions you have a 6% chance to get one. 6%! To give you an idea of how rare sacred shards are you only 1 every month! That’s if you do your daily and weekly quests with the monthly quest. It’s so bad that many have complained about this online. If you want more sacred shards then you have to BUY them. h and they aren’t cheap. Make sure you have a friend with a rich uncle.

So basically Raid: Shadow Legends has so much grind, the most grind we have ever seen in a game. So players get annoyed and want to speed it up. You speed it up by spending money which many are tempted to do as they keep throwing their deals and shop at you. Players buy gems because gems can be used to pretty much get anything else like full maxed out masteries. There’s a offer of £100 for 4200 gems. Do you know what we could buy with £100… not 4200 gems that’s for sure. Players use real money to everything else. The sacred shards are in packs that cost £49 and £29. The dumb part is  that the cheaper of the two has better stuff than the more expensive one. So if you want to have four attempt with sacred shards to get a legendary champion you will need to spend £116. Plus the £100 for the gems so that’s over £200. We checked online and some people have spent over £1000 on this game over time. One dude spent £2400 over 4 months. Some have spent more over time but never realised how much they put into this game. According to ‘sensor tower’ Plarium got 7 million in estimated monthly revenue as off May (check for yourself as we don’t know how reliable that information is). People need to manage their money better. Plarium will never earn a single dime from us and no we didn’t even spend over £50 over our months of playing the game. 

So we won’t try to defend Raid: Shadow Legends. We abandoned Raid: Shadow Legends. If you want to advance in arena against other players you need to spend as so many people in your low ranking like silver have full squads of legendary characters all level 60 with masteries. You will never catch up to them unless you spend or play the game for two years. Too much grind, too much money hungering and too much hidden and bad chance makes Raid: Shadow Legends a terrible game. We stopped having fun and got frustrated. There are more problems like the mission objectives, unbalanced characters etc but we will stick to the grind, chances and spending. We are literally being merciful, there’s so much more to say. Now Raid: Shadow Legends has so many problems which will forever keep it away from… the ‘Earth Walk!’