@Azrael101
You're right that you're going to get unfair matches. And you're right that it's more common for fresh 85s than for level 60 folks or for old 85s.
If it helps (please ignore any suggestions if you only wanted to vent or if you already know all this stuff), the matches are probably based off of toons that you actually use.
EA/CG will not comment on how the difficulty is established, but we know it's a comparison of a squad's Power Rating. At node 1 you face teams with 60% of your best squad's Power Rating. At node 12 it's 120-125% IIRC.
The hard part is that they use the old Power Rating and not the new Galactic Power. The old Power Rating system did not increase Power for increasing abilities. It didn't directly increase it for gear, either. It was calculated off of things like your Health, Protection, Offense, and Speed. However, Health and Protection were weighted particularly heavily, so tanks have higher Power than attackers, even though a squad of 5 attackers will always thrash a squad of 5 tanks.
Gear only affected Power rating if it affected Health, Protection & other basic stats.
This means that some very useful pieces of gear that increase speed by +6 or offense by +60 or more barely affected Power. It also meant that, since ability increases did not affect Power, the Power of a toon did not go up at all when you added a Zeta, even though we all know that Zetas can easily double the effectiveness of a toon.
So your problem is that you're high enough level to get most of the health/protection increases available, but you don't yet have the Zetas, which count for **zero** in the matching algorithm.
All this is to say, there is a way to game the system - to "hack" GW.
It's not clear whether or not the Power comparison is to the best 5 toons, even if they have no synergy, to the highest Power squad you've used in Arena, or to the highest Power squad you've used in GW's first 5 or 6 nodes (the rumor is that the last 6 nodes don't count for setting difficulty. It's hard to know, but the rumor is persistent). But the answers are the same:
1. Increase the power of your B, C & D teams to get them closer to your A teams before boosting your A team. If you're always boosting only a few toons, then difficulty will be set for those toons and you won't have a B or C team that can help you out when things get rough.
2. Don't *just* use your highest power toons in Arena. If you can find a team with good synergy and 5k-10k less power, you'll do at least as well without pushing the difficulty of GW up so much. Yes, you want to increase the power of this good-synergy team as well, but if you can do that through increasing the offense of the team and/or by adding zetas, you'll pay less of a penalty in GW difficulty than if you add Health or Protection to that team. Remember that when choosing mods, which gear to equip, etc.
3. Use your low-power toons on the first 5 nodes of GW. It makes those nodes much harder than they would otherwise be, and doesn't help you at all today, but as your good toons get more powerful, you can rotate them out of the squads you use for the first 5 nodes and rotate new toons in. This way you're constantly adding better toons to your high-power roster, but you won't be getting any difficulty increases for using those toons in the first 5 nodes.
4. Node 6 might-or-might-not count for GW difficulty. It's also significantly harder than nodes 1-5. To play it safe, you can use 4 really good toons that have a Power rating about the same as 5 lower-power toons, and those 4 higher-power toons will actually have an easier time crushing node 6 than a full squad of lesser toons.
The important thing with the squads in GW nodes 1-6 or your Arena squads is that you pick a maximum Galactic Power for your squad and don't let any squad you use exceed that. This isn't perfect, because Galactic Power is calculated differently than the old Power Rating, but by limiting the power you use and graduating toons out as they get too powerful to fit in your lower-level squads, you can hold difficulty close to steady while you grow and develop your roster.
This system is far from perfect, but it is something you can do now both to make the doable-nodes of GW more fun (right now I'm sure it goes from so-easy-it's-boring right to this-is-impossible!) and to hold the currently impossible-nodes steady so that you can get to the point of beating them sooner than would happen if you focussed on only a few toons.
NOW - with all that said, if you're currently someone that fights for a spot in the top 50 of your Arena shard, you won't be able to hold that if you're limiting your Arena power. Just forget the idea entirely. You can't stall your growth in Arena squads while others grow their Arena squads and do as well as you have always done.
So if you're currently near the tops in Arena, you're going to be sacrificing crystals and Arena tokens to get Cash, Crystals, and GW tokens.
But if you're never in the top 50 in Arena, then careful attention to synergies can help you build the teams you need to stay somewhere in the 100-500 range even while limiting growth in Arena Power. I currently use un undeveloped, under geared Royal Guard in the 5th spot of my Arena team, Yoda in the 4th spot for Tenacity Up against all those nasty Sith/Empire debuff squads. Then I use 3 rebels (almost always Wiggs +Lando or Wiggs + Leia). Since Yoda's main purpose is to get off Tenacity UP and then maybe one stun in round 2, I don't have to invest as heavily in Yoda. I have good mods and gear on Wiggs, Leia & Lando. They're protected from 2-shot specials in the early rounds by RG (obviously if you can be 1-shotted, RG doesn't help). They're protected from debuffs by Yoda's Tenacity up ... and then by the cool downs of the specials that apply most of the debuffs. Their only job is dish out damage quickly, and Rebels are good at that.
My squad has a Power of 60k, falls as far as 350th overnight, and finishes 150-250 at payout after beating squads with as much as 84k power as long as I remember to check their stats and make sure they don't have any toons that can go before Biggs or Yoda. I don't need any better than that because I don't want to fight for #1, and over time it's allowed my GW to be much easier than it would otherwise.
It's a long-term strategy, and it does have its tradeoffs, but every strategy has its tradeoffs. You can decides if this strategy is worth it to you.
