Glossary

RAID: Shadow Legends has a vocabulary of its own, and most guides assume you already speak it. Here it is in one place.

Last updated: 5 October 2026

Term	What it means
Affinity	One of four elements — Magic, Spirit, Force or Void — attached to every champion. The first three beat each other in a cycle; Void is neutral.
Accuracy (ACC)	The stat that decides whether a debuff lands. Pitted against the target's Resistance. A debuffer with too little accuracy does nothing at all.
Arena	The competitive mode. In the classic format you attack another player's defence team, which is controlled by the computer rather than by that player in real time.
Artifact	The game's word for a piece of gear. Six armour slots plus three accessory slots.
Book	Shorthand for the consumable used to upgrade a champion's skills, reducing cooldowns or improving effects.
Campaign	The story mode, divided into chapters across escalating difficulty tiers. The standard early source of experience, Silver and fodder champions.
Champion	A collectible unit. Each has an affinity, a rarity, a role, a faction and a set of skills.
Clan	The game's social group, equivalent to a guild in other titles. Clans fight the Clan Boss together and unlock a clan shop.
Clan Boss	A shared boss that every clan member attacks from their own account, with rewards scaling by difficulty tier.
Critical rate / Critical damage	The chance that a hit is critical, and how much extra damage a critical hit does. The pair that most damage builds are designed around.
Debuff	A negative effect applied to an enemy — decreased attack or defence, poison, stun and so on. The backbone of most serious team compositions.
Doom Tower	A rotating multi-floor challenge with its own bosses and secret rooms, refreshed periodically.
Drop rate	The published probability of a given outcome from a randomised summon. Shown inside the game; app store rules require publishers to disclose it.
Dungeon	A repeatable boss encounter farmed for gear and upgrade materials. There are several distinct dungeons, each with its own boss and its own mechanic.
Energy	The consumable that limits how many battles you can run. It refills over real time and can also be bought.
Faction	The in-world group a champion belongs to. There are more than a dozen, and some content requires champions from a specific one.
Faction Wars	A solo mode in which each stage can only be attempted with champions of one faction. Despite the name, it is not clan-versus-clan combat.
Fodder	Low-rarity champions kept only to be consumed when ranking up a champion you actually want.
Gacha	The monetisation model in which you buy a chance at a reward rather than the reward itself. Summoning from shards is a gacha mechanic.
Gems	The premium currency. Earned slowly through play, or bought.
Great Hall	A persistent bonus structure that grants small account-wide stat increases earned through Faction Wars progress.
Mastery	A long-term talent tree unlocked per champion, improving damage, support or defensive behaviour.
Mercy system	A mechanic that raises the chance of a high-rarity summon after a long run of unsuccessful ones. The thresholds are published in the game.
Pity	The community's word for the mercy system.
Rarity	A champion's tier: Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic and Legendary, with a higher tier added in a later update. Higher rarity usually means higher base stats and better skills.
Resistance (RES)	The stat that fights off incoming debuffs. The counterpart to Accuracy.
Shard	The item used to summon a champion. Different shard types have different published odds.
Silver	The soft currency. Spent on levelling champions and, far more expensively, on upgrading gear.
Speed (SPD)	The stat that fills the turn meter. It determines who acts next and how often, and it is the stat most endgame builds are tuned around.
Turn meter	A per-champion bar that fills in proportion to Speed. At 100% the champion takes its turn. Many skills work by filling or draining it.

Terminology follows the game's own wording wherever we could confirm it. Where a term is community slang rather than official, it is marked as such. If a term here has gone out of date, tell us.