I was at a point where I thought I'd never get to Silver 1. After getting High Khatun I was excited just to find out I still got my butt handed to me. Well, after several trial runs, reseach, asking the community and numerous youtube videos. Take my advice, Make High Khatun a speed demon - I got mine to 211 but anything over 200 is good. I also acended her to 4 star(you get a 30% increase speed buff at 3 star accension). My current arena lineup is: High Khatun, Warmaiden, Valkyrie and Elhain. For team synergie, there are numerous youtube videos you can check out to get a good idea. Best of luck!

somthing like this, note I am on level 50 how to win this dudes???

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Tag Team Arena is really hard for beginners. You need not only 4, you need 12 good arena champs. Just ignore it right now, lvl up some heroes and come back later, when you have lvl 60 champs on your own.

Instead of ignoring Tag Team Arena, don't use a defense so you rank stays low. That way, you will face easy opponents.

Fuck all that... I want to know is how this game ever got called the best RPG game... you can't upgrade weapons past a certain point... you can't evolve characters... you can't summon nothing... you can't really do anything with their attacks... you have to spend a fortune just to get a decent line up... this game is trash and needs a complete overhaul cuz it's a complete let down... and shouldn't even be compared to other RPGs I don't care if it is a cellphone game... who allows this blasphemy 

I thought it was just me. I went from Gold IV down to Silver II as if this morning and can't win a single battle. Teams are stacked af, some moving 3 times before my 280+ Apothecary with Gorg lead. 

The account power thing is the only thing that has changed. Working on FW and saving up random epics in hopes they are worth building, but if this is the case ill just toss em. 

plls game fix the arena i dont care about the arena i just want the missions to be completed but im stuck all because of arena and the problem is also that i cant see who will go first i just need to take the riks so i win one and lose one. pls just get the missions with arena out of there or fix the arena im not supose to face accounts will all maxed lvl 60s i just got 1 lvl 60 some good champions lvl 50 speed i got every thing i even got lucky and got some good legendarics but i still get owned pls fix this

He is right...noobs just cry, they want everything on a silver platter....u have to git good...U sound like u are some tough guy or what? System is not broken u have to farm better gear and get better champs, its not the games fault its yours and flatdudes...

'git gud ... 'farm better gear .. get better champs'

So how do you 'git gud'? Get 'better champs'?  Spend a fortune on shards?  And play the stupid broken lottery that this system represents, where you get a tiny % chance to give you a similarly crap chance of actually getting a decent champ, or as mostly happens you get piles of crap ones or duplicates. There are way too many non competitive ones or basically broken ones that make it not worth trying.

I'm in bronze 1/2 currently with a team of a 50 warmaiden, 60 kael, 60 misc monster and 55 apothecary or katun with over 200 speed more or less fully ascended. When I get to go first - about 50% of the time against the endless teams of almost duplicate teams or better with stacks of legionaries,  I might win. Often don't. Either that or cycle the stupid system until i get a few I can actually beat. Thre is no way I can progress beyond bronze 3 (if I get that lucky) currently given the limited number of tries.

If that is how this frankly awful part of the game is supposed  to work then Plarium is doing a grand job of driving people away  - or like me just not spending much money and tinkering on the edges.

Ok.  Here is some feedback from a F2P player.  My Apothecary has all the speed gear I can get for him, and his speed is 217.  He's great for my dungeons and minotaur runs.  If I absolutely squeezed his gear to lean all in on speed, I could get him to about 235 or so, is that REALLY worth it?

To give you some arena context from my account...I fluxuate between Bronze III (yeah...seriously) and Silver II, I get maybe one guaranteed win per refresh, and any time I get on a run and get into Silver II the game drops me into Bronze overnight without me even being there.  Even on my Bronze refreshes I get teams with over 200 speed and better gear than mine.  It's completely absurd.  

I have no issues with accuracy, and I use either Stag Knight or Madame as debuffers.  I have two capable heavy hitters (one is Trunda for god sake) and I understand the necessary mechanics.  My issue is GEAR.  There is no way I can get any other hero (other than Apoth) to even sniff 200 speed so even if my Apoth goes first (and he doesn't always) my nuker gets disrupted.  I don't have pure nuke gear either...so when I get a turn with my nuker I don't wipe the other team very often...I basically have no chance in arena because of speed and gear in general.  No chance.

Now, I could spend, I'm able to, but I refuse to because the game rips you off (for arena especially) so I choose to stay F2P.  I enjoy other parts of the game and that's why I still play.  Arena SUCKS and it's completely BROKEN.

Eventually I will be able to grind my way into better gear, and I'm sure there will be some other issue(s) with arena at that time that I will need to overcome as well...arena is built for whales.  It is what it is.  Palarium could get money out of people like me if it wasn't so ridiculous.

Huh, I never actually bothered to check the "player power" because I figured the rankings would simply be based on your wins and losses (on offense and on defense).  I just checked my matchups and then refreshed and checked the next 10 and everyone is within 100k in terms of player power.  Now, from what was said here, it looks like player power is the stupidest rating in the history of ratings.  I'm on day 29 and my player power is 268k probably because I have geared as many champions as I can for faction wars with crappy gear just so I don't miss out on those level 1 glyphs! (No seriously, not farming available ftp stuff goes counter to pretty much any other game I've ever played... didn't think it would effect account progression because of the stupidest rating system ever).

Regardless, the idea that you should ignore arena until you are significantly later game when the progress missions tell you to advance in the arena early is just horrendous game design.  "Clear stage 7 of the catacombs of Narbuk on hard" is the next mission after "reach silver 1".  I've 3 starred the entire brutal campaign and I did that about a week and a half ago.  I've fully booked Warmaiden and Spirithost just by farming copies in brutal.  I don't care about competing in the arena right now but basic game design leads us towards missions and having the missions so out of order and gating account progression in the great hall is just a bad design poorly executed.  I doubt I'm going to sacrifice all of my 3 and 4 stars or spend silver on unequiping them all at this point... it just seems like a bad game design and bad game management.  I will suggest to anyone who does start the game though to only keep 5-10 characters and to only equip those you are actively using.

Oh, and for those of you wondering why some of us come onto the forums to complain about arena, when I gave my feedback to plarium that the mission order wasn't in line with the difficulty, they told me to come to the forums to give feedback.  I doubt complaining here will do anything but it was the only avenue they gave me.  Heck, it isn't even a new complaint.  I checked out a few videos and Hell Hades had one from mid-July of last year where he got to Silver 1 on a ftp account and commented on how difficult it was, saying it was harder to get to Silver 1 than to stay in Plat.  My account setup isn't that dissimilar so we'll see if High Khatun is enough to get me over the bar.  Still, horrendous mission flow design, bad account progression design for the great hall, and stupid PvP design to have the lowest level of the Arena to be so difficult.  I have no issues with it being difficult to climb up through the higher tiers but normally the lowest levels of something are designed for low level accounts.

Just wanted to add, I pulled 20 shard just to see how it would effect my account power, took me up another 11k with no rares.  It'll really make levling chickens a lot less convienent to limit the number that I'm leveling up at a time.

FYI, I'm at 2.7 million player power. The opponents in my current arena screen range from 665k to 7.49 million player power. I don't exactly believe in these theories about manipulating your player power to affect your arena matchups. 

Well, there is something. When I first got access to the arena, the matchups were perfectly reasonable. I had basically nothing, Athel was my only 50, and I had no problem finding matches and actually winning them. For no apparent reason, it got progressively worse and worse, and this was within weeks, even days. Sure, my arena team got a bit stronger, but nowhere near the level of growth of my opponents. The only thing I had done in that time was basically farm the campaign, collect a bunch of champions and stuck them in storage for later, and leveling up my main team. I was still in the same arena tier. I was using basically the same arena team, I think I switched out Warpriest for Spirit Host and that was it for a long time. My winrate was pretty much the same as it had always been. The only things that had changed for me was my total account power and my level. For a while I even tried losing on purpose and having no defense at all to try to derank so I could get any medals at all, but that did nothing. I'm now in the low S2 tier after clawing my way up from bronze without about 50% luck and 50% sheer determination, and I really don't notice any difference now than from B3-4 a week back.

My current group are all within 83% to 127% of my total power. The average is about 13% higher than mine. There's 1 opponent 1 level higher, the rest are 1-9 levels lower, average 4 levels lower. Every single team except 2 has a higher power level, and 1 of those is a single trash champion that is clearly not meant to actually win (the other is a speed team, which tend to have some low-power champs just for the speed boost). There's a total of 13 legendaries and 17 epics on the field. I've been doing periodic checks on total power level ever since I started noticing things were getting more difficult, and this is pretty much how it has been regardless of what my own power level has been at.

I could try dumping every single champion I have in storage and only keep my arena team, but that's quite a bit of wasted resources if I did. If I get desperate enough, I might consider making a new account and focus exclusively on 4 champions and nothing else and see how that goes. At the very least, if I enter the arena at first opportunity and don't get teams full of legendaries greeting me, I'll know that matchmaking is not random.

Okay, I just opened 56 ancient shards. My power increased from 214k to 304k. Wanna guess what happened to my arena opponents?

From my previous post, at the time the min/max/avg power level compared to mine was 83%/127%/113%. My check just before opening my shards, 76%/135%/106%. This is pretty much in line what I've seen previously, but I didn't actually log all that data. Next check after increasing my power by over 40% with literally nothing else changing whatsoever: 77%/123%/101%. Next one after that: 84%/123%/107%. Coincidentally, the average power increased by 35% and 42% respectively, the latter of which being exactly the same amount my own power increased in a span of 10 minutes. Seeing a pattern here?

So yeah, I'm feeling pretty confident in stating that account power influences matchmaking, which is again completely and utterly absurd. Unbelievably nonsensical. Either that, or this is a coincidence of epic proportions.

Uhhhh ... something something confirmation bias.

You have a sample size of ... three. Not exactly demonstrating strong statistical significance.

Ask yourself a question - what would be the point of a system that worked the way you think it does? Why would Plarium set arena matchmaking up to take player power into account?

Occam's razor - the simplest answer is that arena rankings are a simple ladder. You win, you move up, you lose, you move down. Your matchups are against the ten people closest in rating to yours.

No, I have a sample size considerably larger than that, I just didn't bother writing down the exact numbers. But I have tracked it over the last few weeks, and every time, as I have mentioned multiple times in various threads before though without exact percentages, the only thing that seems to be reasonably equal between me and my opponents has been the account power value. It certainly isn't team strength or number of epics/legendaries. Why did I track it? Because for no apparent reason, my arena matchup started getting harder and harder no matter what tier I was in, and the only thing that changed for me was my level and my account power. Ironically, I had a much easier time winning matches when my team was absolute crap than after I started collecting gear and more champions. I even discarded a bunch of champions (those I could farm) to try it before, and did notice a difference, but then it was only about 10% of my account power that I got rid of so it was difficult to tell if it was just statistical noise.

I've now done 6 samples after opening the shards, and I'm getting pretty much the same numbers. There's some slight variation, but nothing even close to what it was before I opened the shards. In other words, I've been getting consistent results before, and I'm getting consistent results now, the only difference being that I added 42% power to my account and about the same increase in my average opponent power.

As for why they would do matchmaking like that, I don't know. Maybe they think that's being fair, which makes sense in a sort of way, but obviously causes some rather severe issues when the power level is in no way connected to your arena performance. Matchmaking seems to pick opponents around your arena points as well, but nothing prevents both from being factors. 

I'm  reallt  not  so  sure  about  that,  its  very  random.  i  will  quite  often  get  a  page  of  easy  wins  followed  by  high  gold  iv  level  teams.  I  do  believe  player  power  plays  a  part  but  there  will  be  other  things  thst  influence  how  your  team  is  matched. That  said  the  arena  is  very  broken  and  does  need  reform,  there  should  not  be  a  single  level  60  champ  in bronze  I  or  II.  they  are  starter  arenas,  its  the  same  in  mid  gold  IV,  i  maxed  my  apthecary  to  293 speed  with  skull  crowns  aura  and  could  not  beat  a  single  arbiter  team  in  3  refreshes.  I  dont  have  a  arbiter  so  now  i  am  building  a  defense  team,  i'm  tired  of  trying  to  win  the  speed  race  against  very  big  cerdit  cards.  

Interesting. As you also mentioned in a later post, it wouldn't really be that absurd or nonsensical. Obviously the first criterium in matchmaking is that you get opponents ranging from a bit below your rating at the time of refresh, to a bit above it. But then out of the tens of thousands of people who they could select from, how does the system choose? It doesn't actually seem like a bad thing if you're right and it's not entirely random, but tries to take into account player strength - in order to protect actual newbies from advanced players who have somehow fallen back into bronze. Though of course it's true that that system is open to being gamed. It's still better than other non-random criteria coming to mind, though - would you prefer that it did matchmaking based on team power, knowing how misleading that is, or player level? Entirely random might still be the best, but would mean that the brand new accounts would have a higher chance of facing impossible fights right out of the gate... 

Tsd is also right that if such a system exists, it's not applied in the same way, or at all, in higher arena tiers - see my numbers above in gold IV. The very low numbers like that 665k could have to do with the whole mysterious 'bots' thing, but even among what appear to be genuine players, the range is huge. 

Higher tiers may be having the issue of having fewer players in it as well, meaning the algorithm would have less options to choose from. E.g., say it picks opponents from within +/- 50 arena points, and then tries to match against similar power levels, but it runs out of viable opponents and so is forced to pick opponents that are not similar in power level. There may be other criteria, like a safeguard against someone getting picked for matchmaking too often, that may influence it as well by disqualifying many of those near you in arena points and power. In B4-S2 which is the pool I'm swimming in, I'm guessing there are a lot players to pick from.

And actually, yes, I would very much prefer random matchmaking within the same tier (or within an arena point range). Why? Because it means that matchmaking will be based entirely on your performance in the arena, not some arbitrary number. I made a couple of suggestions here a while ago, but to summarize the core points: 1) pick random opponents within same tier/arena point range, 2) whenever a team is selected in the matchmaking, give it a point. Yes, you'll get a mix of incredibly easy and incredibly hard opponents, especially at the lower tiers, but so what? You pick the easy fights, crush them, and move up until the fights are no longer quite as easy. Likewise, if you're far too strong for the tier you're in, no one will want to fight you and you'll just float up until you reach a tier where there are people who will.

There may be some adjustments required to prevent arena point inflation (e.g. a natural decay), but ideally everyone should be in the tier where they belong. Account-power based matchmaking may protect new accounts from getting crushed by far too powerful opponents, but it likewise drags down people to lower tiers because they haven't optimized their account power. Considering faction crypts is a game feature that is built around collecting as many heroes as possible, having a system that punish you for trying to make use of it is a strange design choice (and likewise, if you want to use the arena then you're punished for wanting to do crypts). Instead of trying to shield low-power players from high-power players, ensure that those high-power players are not in an arena tier where they don't belong in the first place.