Short answer to your question is no. That said, arena has gotten harder lately. Can you post your champs, pool and gear you're using so folks can get a look at your situation and maybe help?

Agreed with OP, Arena has turned back into the tedious nightmare it was several months ago. If you want to drive players away, this is how to do it.

I think you are seeing the Gold player drift invasion into the lower tiers.  In my challenges most of my opponents are more than 50% stronger than I.  I just wait until I get someone lower powered than I, but even then it is true that "speed kills".  My top speed is about 200, and many times I take the first one or two hits, hopefully can survive to whack back at them.  Speed can be evasive, even with 6 speed artifacts it is tough to get much speed. I see these people with a 4 star High Katun, no ascensions, and just blow my doors off.  I am holdimg position in Silver 4, used to be Gold 4, but can't even hope to get there and my Great Hall is hurting.

If you're winning it's easy - I agree it's challenging, but if you've been playing a few years then by now you should have a team capable of going frst in at least 50% of battles

Yes generally speed teams win, that's why they are used, but if you're not going first at all then I'm afraid you've not got the right gear and after the time you've played you should have

My team (G4) almost always goes last, 90% of battles or so.  And that's fighting most only teams with signifiantly lower power than my team for the most part.  If I fight a team with similar power and speed lead, I lose most every battle.  The challenging part for me is picking which teams I fight.  Even though I most always lose the speed battle I win most of my battles (70% to 90%).  Some refreshes I can occasionally clear, others I'm lucky to pick one or two teams to fight.  I do pretty good, I usually use around 1700 gold medals each CvC so that's over 100/day.

Yep very valid point - it does not have to be the speed meta, but if you are going second then build your team accordingly, just throwing four champs together generally won't work

The OP could post his lineups and see if anyone can help

I have been winning for months in gold 4.  Over a 90% win rate has turned into an over 90% loss rate with the exact same team.  I was steadily closing in on the mission for 3 lvl 10 in great hall, now each week I am dropping a tier and praying I can scrape out the last few hundred gold medals I need before being dropped to silver.  What is the point of the tiers if I am facing the exact same crushing defeats in now 3 different teirs.

Been at G4 for monthes now. This is just like the last time. And us F2P don't all have Aribter to make up for the speed. Almost time to move on to something that's fun just a shame to have wasted almost 2 years and hit the wall.

I think the release of G5 is supposed to be early this year, maybe January? I think plat was getting expanded as well?

Hopefully this will even out the arena ranks for people and allow progression in this area of the game.

The two new hydra sets look like they may break the speed meta of arena as well.

Only time will tell on all these things.

I have a feeling the addition of G5 will result in more disappointment, moderators prepare yourself! lol

Stuck in bronze permanently here, and definitely the teams are crazy more powerful. I know a lot gamers "crunch numbers" which is not in my skillset, but as just a normal player it seems to me like the power ratings are pointless, because a lot of these defense teams are obviously set up to deliberately get a lower power rating than what they are capable of defeating. Either by having fewer champions on the team, by including an underpower champ, or by using defensive champions who have crazy speed and artifacts. So the power ratings may put them in bronze 3 even though their actual ability is more gold tier. Is that possible?

Your observation that power ratings are pointless is, more or less, true.

It can indicate something about the stats of the opposite team. The resistance stat has a very high value to power rating, so in general teams with high power rating often try to eat your hit and take revenge. In most cases the champions they use can confirm that. Rhazin as team leader, Duches Lilitu or Candraphon (for their damage reducing passives) are typical champs for a go second team.

Is it possible to be in Bronze 3 while you could be in Gold instead? Maybe, but very unlikely. Nobody would do that. Your opponents want to earn gold medals instead of bronze medals.

That sandbagging into lower tiers happens only inside the same "metal", from Bronze 4 into Bronze 3 or lower. They feel that they can't compete in Silver, so they go a little bit backwards (putting a lvl 1 def team at the beginning of the weekly ranking period) until they reach a tier where they can win all arena offense battles, bring back their real defense now and try to be back in the best arena tier they can achieve at the end of the week. In that way they can earn some bronze medals. But nobody would do sandbagging into a lower "metal". There is no need to collect bronze medals for gold players.

 I have to say there does seem to be something very out of whack with the matchmaker. I'm in Silver III, my team is pretty fast for this tier and I win the speed race most of the time but I'm pulling sheets full of teams 50-100% my power level and they're accounts that are obviously much older than mine. I can win fights here and there which is fine for grinding medals and ok for completing fusion events but it's getting to the point that it's a real problem when "Win 30 Materials in Classic Arena battles" shows up in my dailies because it takes an absurd number of refreshes to find enough suitable opponents. It's rare that I can even use all the Arena keys I get, not with a decent win rate anyway. My Demon Lord team is 2-keying Nightmare now so I'm working on improving my arena team but it looks like it will be just more of the same at a slightly higher tier. I have a feeling that this form of PVP isn't well suited for the game.

Here my current team... I struggle to stay in Gold I to be able to upgrade Hall but it takes insane amount of gems for refreshing to find an oponent I can win against (see comments above this post). If it would be just me we can blame gear, hero setup, and bla bla bla but it seems to be more common that I initially thought

i

Team breakdown is this: (currently as I was trying different combinations... seems like I wasn't lucky enough to get legend speed heroes)

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lack of heroes is one thing, weak builds is another and to be frank, all four of these champions builds are awful. as mentioned above, the defining piece of the current meta is speed and all of your champions have terrible speed. i can see kael and hellmut aren't even wearing speed boots and lilitu either isn't or has zero speed substats, not to mention almost no speed sets on your champions.

talking of sets, you've made a couple of mistakes with yours. first off, you're trying to hard to get set bonuses. ideally you want to have your champions in matching armour sets, but it's far more important that you get the right stats and good substats on the artifacts. particularly in the early game, you're better off just putting the best artifacts you have on your champions and trying to replace them over time once you have good artifacts from the same set. 

second, the sets you've chosen are, shall we say, questionable. to start off with, you've got a lifesteal set on your lilitu. lilitu, whose a2 and a3 don't do any damage and whose a1 deals negligible amounts because she's a healer and support champion, not a damage dealer. you've then capped her off with a perception set, a set whose primary job is to boost accuracy, a stat which lilitu doesn't use. as you can see, not the best choices. moving to your other champions, you've got kael in a destroy set, which is great if you're trying to kill borgoth the scarab king and fairly useless otherwise and hellmut in a toxic set, which is great for absolutely nothing. it's largely considered to be one of the worst armour sets in the game. ninja's savage set isn't bad, but again you're sacrificing the stats you need in order to get the set bonus.

in terms of rebuilding, kael and ninja are both dps champs so you'll want them at 100% crit rate or as close to it as you can get. hellmut will want that as well since his abilities rely on getting crits. crit rate/damage gloves for all of them, atk% chestplates for ninja and kael (hellmut isn't as concerned with damage, so he could use accuracy or hp/def if you want to boost his survivability), speed boots for all of your champions. literally all of them, there are only a handful of niche builds in the entire game that call for any other stat. as i said earlier, it's far more important to have good artifacts than subpar artifacts with a set bonus, but if you are going to try to get bonuses, i'd advise sticking to the two piece sets for now. it's easier to get two decent pieces of gear than four and raw stats will serve you better at the moment than any of the effects from a four piece set. as for your champions, drop either kael or ninja and replace them with an aoe def down champion and ideally find someone with better tm manipulation to replace hellmut.

Carpe_Piscis allready wrote what is wrong with your gear.

But your team combination is awfull as well. The speed of your team is so low, you will go second in most fights. Exept of the passive from Duchess you have no defensive utility to survive a hit. Maybe duchess herself with her hp and def may survive and revive the others, but she revives them with 0 turnmeter. So your only move in your round is reviving your champs, and the whole enemy team gets a second turn to act.

If you want to build a go second team, you need champs that fit into this strategy: Rhazin as team leader (for his Aura), Seeker (for his passive def buff) and Candraphon together with Duchess would be a good team. Jewlery with the reaction effect on everybody would help a lot.

Carpe_Piscis and Skadi... cheers for the input. True I was trying to stick to sets when armoring warriors. According to what you say it's really secondary..

@Skadi... I don't have Rhasin nor Candraphon available (any suggestions for replacement)?

I'll work on remake of the existing ones :)

post your roster

As we don't know wich champs you have at your account, it's hard to suggest a team.

But in general teams that go second are much harder to build and equip than typical nuker teams. You could use High Khatun (speed), Duchess (increase attack), any def debuffer (Warmaiden if you don't have a better one, or Dhukk, Stag Knight, Tyrel, Thylessia, Alexandr, Armina, Uugo, Deacon Armstrong,...) and Ninja (damage dealer).

You should not hunt other speed teams (they are probably faster, according to the gear you showed us), the speed buff from High Khatun is just to ensure you really go first when you attack enemies without speed buffer. 

There are tons of bad arena teams (and, tbh, your actual team is among them), and High Khatun, Duchess, Warmaiden, Ninja should be good enough to earn some medals.