Artifact enhancement – Event Guide

Artifact enhancement isn’t the most fun aspect of Raid: Shadow Legends. Lots of RNG, somewhat slow and clunky, and very expensive. However, it’s one of the most crucial aspects of the game as gear completely transforms your champions and provides huge amounts of customization. It’s also the subject of one of the game’s multiple types of events. In this guide we’ll take a look at data to determine how best to rock those Raid Shadow Legends artifact enhancement events.

Raid Shadow Legends artifact enhancement events

First, let’s have a look at the rewards from a sample artifact enhancement event that’s run in the past:

As you can see above, to claim the top prize of 2 void shards you’d need to rack up 6000 points in this event. Now, let’s have a look at how points are made:

The table above shows the rewards for reaching specific levels (4, 8, 12, 16, which are the tiers where gear substats get a boost) by gear star level. The rewards are the same for any type of gear upgrades (including accessories).

Here’s what we’ll look into:

1. What’s the most cost effective level/tier combination to focus on?
2. If you want maximum rewards, how much silver (an un-upgraded pieces of gear) should you save up ahead of an event?

Level upgrade costs

First let’s have a look at gear upgrade costs. Note that accessory upgrades are more expensive for the same gear tier but yield the same point rewards, so to be cost effective you should not be upgrading accessories during these events.

UPGRADE COST PER ATTEMPT BY GEAR LEVEL & TIER

Now, to compute how much we expect it to actually cost to upgrade to a certain tier, we need to factor in the Upgrade Chance. I haven’t found official numbers published anywhere, so instead I recorded 200 attempts at each difficulty level (high, medium, low, and minimal), and here were the results:

UPGRADE CHANCE BY DIFFICULTY LEVEL

Combining those two pieces of data, let’s take a look at the total expected cost per tier, before finally looking at the cost / points:

TOTAL UPGRADE COST FOR TIERS BY LEVEL, FACTORING IN UPGRADE CHANCE

Looking at the table above, you can see how much silver you should expect to spend to upgrade gear to a certain level. The last row shows you the total expected cost, so for example a 5* piece of gear is expected to cost nearly 1.5 million silver to fully upgrade to Level 16, while a 6* piece is expected to cost nearly 2 million.

Ok so now let’s put everything together and summarize the data:

• Level 4 presents the lowest cost/point (particularly 1* gear, which yields a point for only 1,170 silver).
• Level 8 is generally quite expensive as far as the cost / point goes, and that’s true because the point yields at that level are very low. Therefore it’s never worth stopping at Level 8 when upgrading for points.
• Level 12 provides the best yields for 6* gear, with 4* and 5* just behind.
• Level 16 yields are roughly the same for 3*-6* gear. The 6* yield is lower for Level 16 than Level 12 however, by about 23%.
• The weighted average cost for fully upgrading gear to Level 16 is the lowest for 6* gear (4,568 silver/point), but only by a handful of silver. However (and this isn’t shown on the chart), the weighted average is even lower if you take 6* gear only up to Level 12 (4,072 silver/point), due to the great point yield for 6* at that level.

Based on this analysis, you can see you’ll get a better yield by upgrading 1* gear to Level 4 (impractical, more on that below) and for fully upgrading to Level 16 you’re better off focusing on 4*, 5*, and 6* gear.

How much Silver and Gear will I need to max out rewards?

Assuming you need to get 6,000 points to max out rewards (this will of course vary, but you can adjust as needed), let’s see how much silver and gear you’ll need to save up.

Earlier we saw that upgrading 1* gear to Level 4 gives you the best yield of 1,170 silver / point. At this cost, you’d need 7,020,000 silver to max out rewards. However, you’d need a whopping 6,000 pieces of 1* gear, so that would be impractical (and a pain in the ass).

Looking at a more practical scenario, if you upgraded 5* and 6* gear all the way (roughly averaging a cost of 4,600 silver / point) it would cost you 27,600,000 silver to get those 6,000 points. You’d need to max out only ~19 pieces of 5* gear, or ~14 pieces of 6* gear, in order to max out. You can reduce that slightly by focusing on getting all 6* gear to Level 12 to start off, as the yield for that is better (roughly 4,000 silver/point).

If you’re scraping for silver, you can also upgrade as many pieces to Level 4 as you can, as the yields at Level 4 are better than every other level.

I hope this guide helps you make better use of your hard-earned silver, and helps you save up what you need to get those sweet max rewards at the next Raid Shadow Legends Artifact Enhancement event.

Looking to find the best heroes to put your gear on? Check out our Champion Index!