Managing Your Squad in Ruined King

ST
Written by
Integrated MA, Certified Relationship Coach

Ruined King: A League of Legends Story offers players an engaging tactical RPG experience where strategic team composition plays a crucial role in overcoming challenges. Unlike many RPGs that allow you to carry an entire roster into battle, this game limits your active fighting force to just three characters at any given time. Understanding how to effectively manage your available champions and transition between team members becomes essential for progression, especially as you unlock the full roster and face increasingly difficult encounters.

Understanding the Champion Roster

As you progress through Ruined King’s main storyline, you gradually gain access to an impressive array of playable champions, each bringing unique abilities and combat styles to your adventures. The game features six distinct champions that players can recruit and utilize throughout their journey. Each character possesses their own strengths, weaknesses, and specialized abilities that complement different combat situations.

The complete champion roster available in Ruined King includes:

  • Miss Fortune – A ranged damage dealer specializing in firepower and explosive attacks
  • Illaoi – A melee fighter with powerful crowd control and tentacle-based abilities
  • Braum – A defensive tank character designed to protect teammates and absorb damage
  • Ahri – A magical caster capable of dealing elemental damage and providing crowd control
  • Yasuo – A wind-based swordsman offering mobility and burst damage potential
  • Pyke – A stealthy assassin character with high burst damage and unique assassination mechanics

While all six champions are available through progression, the three-character party limitation means you cannot bring everyone into combat simultaneously. This design choice forces players to make strategic decisions about team composition and encourages multiple playthroughs with different character combinations.

The Party Limitation System

One of the most fundamental mechanics in Ruined King involves managing your active party versus your available roster. The game restricts active combat participants to exactly three characters, creating a tactical layer where you must carefully select which champions best suit your current objectives and anticipated challenges.

This limitation system encourages strategic thinking and team synergy planning. Rather than simply bringing your strongest characters, successful players learn to balance offense, defense, and utility. Some encounters may demand multiple defensive characters, while others benefit from aggressive damage output. This variety in team composition requirements throughout the game ensures that different character combinations remain viable and valuable.

The restriction to three active members also affects inventory management and resource allocation, as players must decide whether to distribute consumable items across multiple characters or focus their resources on a core team.

Finding Rest Points for Team Adjustments

A critical constraint in Ruined King is that party composition changes can only be made at designated rest points throughout the game world. These locations serve as safe havens where you can recover resources, prepare for upcoming challenges, and make strategic adjustments to your roster.

Rest points manifest in two primary forms within the game:

  • Inns and Taverns – Settlements and towns feature establishments where your party can temporarily halt their journey and reorganize
  • Campfires – Outdoor locations where your party can establish temporary camps during exploration of dungeons and wilderness areas

This design restriction means you cannot swap team members during active exploration, dungeon delves, or combat situations. If you realize mid-exploration that your current party composition is suboptimal for the challenges ahead, you must backtrack to the nearest rest point to make adjustments. This restriction adds strategic depth by forcing players to think critically about their team composition before departing from rest locations.

The inability to swap characters on the fly encourages players to scout ahead mentally or save frequently, creating a planning-oriented gameplay style distinct from real-time tactical systems where flexibility is paramount.

Step-by-Step Party Adjustment Process

Once you arrive at a valid rest point, accessing and modifying your party composition follows a straightforward procedural sequence. Understanding this process ensures smooth team management without confusion during critical moments.

The complete process for adjusting your party at rest locations includes:

  1. Access the rest menu from the rest point interface
  2. Navigate to the “Choose Party Members” submenu option
  3. Review the available champions display, typically showing active members on one side and available benched members on the other
  4. Select the active champion you wish to remove from your current roster
  5. Confirm the removal action through the appropriate menu selection
  6. Highlight and select the benched champion you want to add to your active party
  7. Confirm the addition through the menu interface
  8. Exit the party management interface by pressing the appropriate button (typically ESC on keyboard interfaces)

This process repeats as many times as necessary until your party composition matches your strategic intentions. You can make multiple swaps in succession, allowing comprehensive team restructuring during longer rest periods.

Understanding Experience Progression Mechanics

An important aspect of Ruined King’s progression system involves how experience points are distributed among your roster. Unlike some RPGs where benched characters fall behind in experience, Ruined King implements a universal experience system where all available champions gain experience simultaneously.

This progression design eliminates the traditional grinding problem where players feel obligated to keep using the same characters throughout the game. Whether a champion actively participates in combat or remains benched at your current location, they accumulate experience from quest completion and monster defeats. This encourages players to experiment with different team combinations without fear of crippling their benched characters’ combat effectiveness.

The universal experience system also means that when you recruit new champions later in the game, they quickly catch up to your existing characters in terms of levels and statistical power, making them immediately viable additions to your roster rather than requiring extensive grinding to bring them up to speed.

Optimizing Team Composition for Different Scenarios

While the mechanical process of swapping characters remains consistent, strategic team composition varies significantly depending on your current objectives and anticipated challenges.

Consider these compositional strategies for various gameplay situations:

  • Boss Encounters – Often demand balanced teams with reliable damage output, adequate defensive capabilities, and crowd control options to manage boss mechanics
  • Large Enemy Groups – Benefit from area-of-effect damage dealers and crowd control specialists who can manage multiple threats simultaneously
  • Exploration and Puzzle Solving – May require specific champions capable of interacting with environmental elements or possessing particular ability types needed to progress
  • Stealth Sections – Potentially favor characters with stealth or evasion capabilities for sections emphasizing infiltration over direct combat
  • Resource-Constrained Areas – Warrant teams with efficient resource management and sustainability rather than pure damage output

Experimenting with different combinations and noting which team compositions perform well against specific enemy types helps you develop a deeper understanding of character synergies and combat effectiveness.

Managing Equipment and Resources Across Your Roster

Beyond character selection, effective squad management extends to equipment distribution and consumable allocation. Since your benched characters don’t participate in combat during a given section, strategic equipment placement across your roster ensures that swapped-in characters possess adequate gear for their new roles.

Resource management becomes more complex as your roster expands. Consumable items that restore health, mana, or provide temporary buffs become precious resources that should be distributed strategically. Consider stockpiling items before visiting rest points where you know major team swaps will occur.

Technical Considerations for Party Management

Players using gamepad controllers occasionally encounter minor interface quirks when managing party composition. In some instances, the system may incorrectly display a “Party is Full” message even when attempting to remove a character, preventing normal swapping procedures.

A simple workaround involves switching to mouse control for party management menus, which resolves the display issue in most cases. This workaround highlights how interface design can occasionally create friction that different input methods resolve differently.

Strategic Rest Point Planning

Since party changes only occur at rest points, effective squad management involves planning your exploration routes with rest locations in mind. Observing the map layout before extensive dungeon delves helps you identify nearby rest points for emergency team adjustments if your current composition proves inadequate.

Experienced players develop habits of visiting rest points before challenging encounters, using the opportunity to refresh resources, recover health and mana, and optimize their party composition simultaneously. This multi-purpose approach to rest points maximizes efficiency during progression.

Maximizing Your Squad Potential

Ruined King’s party system ultimately encourages players to develop proficiency with multiple champions rather than specializing in a single character or predictable team combination. By regularly rotating champions through your active roster, you gain familiarity with diverse combat abilities and learn how different skill sets interact with various encounter types.

The universal experience system supports this experimental approach, ensuring that champions outside your current active roster develop alongside your main team. When you eventually recruit later-game champions, they join your party at competitive power levels rather than requiring extensive catching up.

Mastering party management transforms squad composition from a mere mechanical process into a strategic element that significantly impacts your success against challenging encounters and your overall enjoyment of the game’s combat system.

References

  1. Ruined King: Team – how to change its composition? — GamePressure. Accessed 2026-05-02. https://www.gamepressure.com/ruined-king-a-league-of-legends-story/team-how-to-change-its-composition/z6f475
  2. Ruined King: How to Switch and Change Party Members — GameSkinny. Accessed 2026-05-02. https://www.gameskinny.com/tips/ruined-king-how-to-switch-and-change-party-members/
  3. Let’s Play Ruined King (Blind, Veteran Mode) Part 13 – Swapping Party Members and Collecting Debts — YouTube. Accessed 2026-05-02.
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