I am also a quite new players, I am lvl 68 atm and I have been doing prety much same as you are right now.
https://swgoh.gg/u/lakson/
So there are a few very big mistakes you said here and that you need to fix. First off, YOU NEED MODS. You are close to having your rebels to 5 stars and you can get 5 star mods then. It does not matter that they are hp mods. I did a quick calculation on my zeb and lets see what the 5 star hp mods x6 give him:
+34.07%Protection
+15%Tenacity
+12Speed
+6.4%Health
+6.18%Defense
+4.55%Potency
+4%Offense
+1.6%Critical Chance
+307Protection
+112Health
+90Offense
+15Defense
and I just slapped whatever mod looked good on him. In short, YOU MUST GET MODS. Even more important than ezra/hera shards unless you are ~10 shards short of 5 starring someone. You still get cantina tokens from mod battles so you will have no trouble leveing chopper.
I got scoundrels for cred heist (ST Han and Boba) And I have to admit that was the WORST decision I made on this account. Yeah, they are good, the creds are good, but those are 80 arena shards off my Kan and I bought 20-30 boba shards instead of chopper. I would have a signifcantly better arena standing if I did not do that (leveling a char from 6 to 7 stars gives you 3000-3500 GP so consider the jump). I made maybe a million credits off 2 heists.
A lot of people giving advice here are veterans. Playing in VETERAN SHARDS. What they say is true, but some of it does not apply to you. First off, when people say "stop focusing phoenix" they mean stop gearing them. All of them should be 7 starred. And you will play for at least 2-3 months before you come to the point of starting to drop your phoenixes. I am top 50 in my shard and ALL teams are phoenix/NS. Save for one FO whale. Dont even think about stopping phoenixes before you get at least lvl 80 and get zetas. By that time you will have a lot of 7 star characters to choose from. I am going for a empire team atm, my phoenixes are all 7 star. Not even close to gear finished.
A very strange thing I saw in my arena is that above rank 100 is a quite LOWER GP ratio of phoenix teams than below. I have seen 50k phoenix teams below 100 while above are around 46-7k. Only explanation to this I have come to is that people refuse to spend crystals on arena refreshes. Big mistake. Spend 50 gems now for 5 refreshes and you will be getting 50 extra every day from then since you boosted your rank.
As for ships, I am somehow top 20 in my squad. I did not get lucky on pulls, completely f2p. I did not listen to any guides other than getting biggs. Again, EVERYONE IS EQUAL IN FLEET. Nobody can prep for that since it is lvl 60. You will again have whales but as I said, I had no prep and top 20 np.
I started buying phoenix ships whenever I can. On side of that I am buying boba ship when I see it and tie advanced. Some char shards, do not hoard too much. Always have 400 tokens on refresh in case you see shards you need. Once you unlock phoenix ships the jump will be BIG. They heavily outweight any rebel/NS squads since lando/any NS/ all main characters for those teams dont go into ships. Yours do.
And as far as phoenix arena advise goes, I still lose sometimes due to time limitation. My opening is ALWAYS the same: Chopper dispell on other chopper to remove evasion, ezra auto, hera auto, zeb sunder auto, kannan auto. Get that chopper shield off and prepare for ezra/hera burst. If I get at least one ezra double attack I can often kill that stupid bot and then I just auto on hera/kannan/zeb/ezra last. I started expermenting using zeb to stun kannan. I save all my dispells for kannan taunt/chopper taunt. Sometimes RNG will just make you lose. Oh and those HP mods will help you in arena also by making others draw against you. It's not all about attack in arena.
