GW difficulty

@johnnysocks71, so today was the first GW I was able to complete in a week. on 11 i faced ZQGJ lead with Yoda, some healer, Palp and Sid, then 12 had Zader, Kylo, Boba, Palp, and Barriss. Hopefully the degree of difficulty balances out for you too. I feel like I was in the same boat this week. Everytime I think I finally make headway in this game (getting my first zeta on Vader) you get your ass handed to you for the next three to five days, then it goes back to normal?

@ObiJuanPollo. I agree. Not having any luck on Node 12 yet. Nodes 6, 10 and 11 are wiping out my other teams as they are not geared high enough. Most of my other teams are stuck at gear 8. My arena team is the only team with gear 10-11. This post went off the rails. I was just pointing out (and not just me) that GW has seemed to be alot harder lately.

I think it is normal that you can not beat GW during a specific phase of the game - mainly when you are close to 85 or fresh 85. You have put most effort in your arena team, got your first zeta and no backup. Just accept that you cant beat GW during this stage of the game.

There were 1-2 months were I almost never finished GW. After that, my rooster had improved and I had invested in the right toons to beat the unbeatable squads (mostly Nihilus, Zylo and Zarris). Then there was the time where I had the most fun in GW - I got all the current meta Trawn-Nihilus-Kenobi squads in node 12 that were really, really hard to beat. I only had six good toons and tried a lot to get the right composition and strategy to beat these teams.

Now my node 12 is broken and the fun is gone. It has become too easy.

Moreover, don't expect to beat GW with a pure damage squad (like Wiggs, Lando, Boba). GW is all about control.

"johnnysocks71;c-1181524" wrote:
@ObiJuanPollo. I agree. Not having any luck on Node 12 yet. Nodes 6, 10 and 11 are wiping out my other teams as they are not geared high enough. Most of my other teams are stuck at gear 8. My arena team is the only team with gear 10-11. This post went off the rails. I was just pointing out (and not just me) that GW has seemed to be alot harder lately.

I highlighted the important fact @johnnysocks71 .
GW's difficulty is keyed to the power of your top 5. In your case, it clearly is your top 5, since they have the high gear level, but also probably your best mods.
In general, with any given, well functioning squad, you can beat opponents with a gear level one higher than yours, nearly never two higher. I would say that a character's dangerousness doubles with each gear level.
So in fact, in such a situation, nodes 6, 9, 11 and 12 can only be beaten by your top squad - and I would guess that your next best team of g8 is still not sufficient for nodes 7, 8 or 10 (let alone all three of them). In all, your top squad would have four Arena-grade fights, meeting enemies with full protection/health and no cooldown, while being slowly depleted of protection, if not health, and a hard time to fix cooldowns between battles #11 and #12.
GW has been harder to you, because you've pushed your Arena team so high compared to the next two or three squads in your roster. Push two or three squads to g9-10, and you'll beat GW again.

@Ambassador. Thank you for your thoughts. I have been working on other squads. Biggest problem right now is gear and credits. A lot of my other toons are stuck at gear 8. I average about 5 million in credit heist every time its available but the credits are spent quickly on mods or leveling up characters. I recently started reading swgoh forums which has helped tremendously with my game play. I was so focused on one team that the other squads suffered. I'm finally doing better in Tier 6 rancor raids now that I have zader. But my teams are awful on AAT raids. No good jedi, clones, resistance or droid squads yet. A lot of the advice I see on the forum is to focus on one team or character, which I have done with my empire/sith arena team. But it is hard when the developers are constantly pushing new events and new toons. It's easy to lose focus. I am currently working on a first order and resistance squad. It's taking a lot of time. FOTP and FOST are slow grinds. Eventually things will even out. I lose my patience at times because the game can be incredibly frustrating.

"Ambassador;c-1181546" wrote:
Push two or three squads to g9-10, and you'll beat GW again.

I strongly disagree. For example, if your node 12 is something like GK (L), Zarriss, Trawn, DN and R2, most of your squads will do absolutely nothing. Even fully geared and modded Rebels, Droids and Clones will do nothing. You need some of the best toons of the game to have a chance against such squads, otherwise there will be another post in this forum which goes like "I sent 40 toons against this squad and not even a scratch, nerf!". Your B-squads are for the easier nodes, not the last one.

@johnnysocks71 People who advise to focus on one team are mistaken. It's the wrong way to play this game. Well, maybe not "wrong" per se, as people can maybe find some fun that way, but it's a thoroughly inefficient way to play it.
Those advice are on the basis that a good spot on Arena will give lots of crystals, which is true, but the spots where lots of crystals can be obtained are, in newer shards, quickly filled by players who spend a good lot of money on the game. And so, they can afford to develop several teams at the same time, without sacrificing any part of the game. And for a F2P, it's very hard to compete for the top spots, even while focusing on one team, so the trade-off is huge, for maybe minimal gains.
Also, the more players focus on one squad for Arena, the more competition there are, and so it draws the whole shard to a useless stand-off.
But, by taking the wide, slow and steady approach, with patience you get to a point where you gather more ressources from different sources than you would from a top-100 spot on Arena, then more than from a top-50. Once you factor in the gains you make on GW, Rancor, AAT, events, etc, it really outshines what you get from Arena (and when being too narrowly focused, you risk far more to be left adrift when, not if, the meta changes).
Even if you spend money on the game, you're better off assuring the six basic energy refills, and buy some gear, than using all on one toon and Arena refreshes.

Well, top 20 will give you 100 crystals more a day than top 100. Thats more than the crystals from two whole GWs. I don't know how you can get additional100 crystals a day from other parts of the game than arena with a large rooster instead of a small one.

I am in the top 5 as a 100% FTP in a Jan 2017 shard because I put my efforts on only a few toons. But these are very good toons, I am sure I can build other teams with my Zylo, Nihilus, Rex and Kenobi. Same goes for Trawn, Chaze or R2D2 and to a lesser extend Palp, Boba, B2, Wiggs or Zarriss. These toons are so versatile that a new meta usually involves three of these toons.

Sure, its different when you prepare for hAAT, but even than the superteam approach (one gear 11 team per guildmate instead of four bad ones) is more effective.

And as I said, eventually you will face teams in GW where quality beats quantity.

If you had a choice, who would you run as leader; Zader or DN? (other squad members are CD, EP, RG) I can zeta one of DN's abilities today.

@JaminSpace You only see crystals. GW gives you more credits than 600 crystals can buy. Gives you more ship currency than 100 crystals can buy. Gives you 15 character shards (of your choice, plus half-a-dozen random more), more than 100 crystals can buy. Gives you several purple ability mats, that your crystals can't buy. See the whole, don't get fooled by the shiny. You are also on a very young shard, you'll soon find if you can hold on there.