Time to get serious. Need help

Grendel007

I have been playing game for a while now, mostly just doing my own thing, but I am tired of not getting through GW and being stuck around 300-350 in arena. I am ready to make my team(s) better, so I need a bit of help from you all.
I only vaugely understand what a meta is. How do I find out what it currently is and which toons work with it?
The forums are great but is there a place that keeps track of this rather than sitting through comments for bits and pieces of info?
I have been running the same basic team in arena and GW. I understand this is not ideal. What type of toons should I be looking at for each squad?
The star problem. I use my max starred toons but some on here have hinted that certain toons of lower star rank are better than a full starred toon a lot of times. How is this?
It seems a lot of the abilities are sort of "hidden" at higher ranks. How can I find out if my 4* semi-useful toon turns into a monster at 6-7*?
I mostly went for fast, high damage toons (thanks update) but I can see the usefulness of synergy so I am trying to figure that out.
All in all I like this game and would like to be competitive, so any help anyone can offer is appreciated. Here is a partial list of the toons I currently have. All are as max gear as I can get and between lvl 69-72.
7*- Lumi, Sid
6*- RP, Phasma, Kylo, QGJ, IG-86, Ventress, JC
5*- Mace
4*- Vader, Dooku
I have a 3* Han I am working on as he seems to fit into the current teams. I also have 3* Poe and 2* RG ( but it is too hard to farm RG)
Thanks

darth_suicune

Gonna try to give some answers:

-Meta comes from metagame, and is almost literally "data about the game". It's used mainly to say in a short sentence what are the most used characters at the current state of the game. Some people misuse this term badly, and some have a slightly different meaning, but this is in theory what it means. How to find what is the current meta? Well, it's hard if you are in the ~300 position, but you can get a hint. Go into the arena, go to the leaderboard and check what leader are most people using in the top 50 or top 100. That's the lead meta for your leaderboard. Which toons work with it is usually a matter of test and error. You can read messages in the forums and you will come to a better understanding on what works and what doesn't. As a general term, if it's in the most used teams, it usually works well. You can usually make almost any theme squad you want work acceptably well, but you need to understand their synergies as well.

-Nope. You can only gather that through the forums or through examining the teams of the top of the leaderboards (afaik), but this is usually slightly worse as you have a much limited sample size.

-It's not that it's not ideal to use the same team in GW or arena, there is no problem "as is" with that. The problem is, GW and Arena have different objectives and rules, which makes some characters better in one and some characters better in the other. Sid or Barris, even Luminara, are better in GW (healers, or self-heal, for example), while characters that deal heavy amounts of damage (ig86, qgj) are better for the arena where survivability is less important compared to defeating your opponent. In GW you want to finish your opponent with as much remaining health as possible without using your Cooldown abilities in your last turns. That doesn't apply in the arena. In its current state, the meta for the arena is mostly composed of Dooku leads, with some qgj, phasma or sthan leads as well, RG is present in almost any top team, Daka is also quite common, QGJ, GS (Geonosian Soldier), Rey, Leia (for P2P) and IG86 usually round up the most commonly used characters as of now. RG provides survivability to your damage dealers. Daka provides up to 2 stuns a turn with a chance to res fallen members. Dooku lead an insane amount of dodge with possibility to give offense up to the char that dodges. QGJ and GS have a 1 turn CD assist ability. Rey and Leia deal quite a lot of damage and are very fast. IG86 also has an assist but with 2 turn CD, and hits usually quite hard, but is slower than the others. There are more characters used out there (yoda, ig88, poe, poggle...) but are less common compared to this ones.

-The star problem: Running your highest star characters is usually a good suggestion. The problem is abilities. If the abilities of your 6* Chewbacca are worse than those of your 4* RG, then using Royal guard might be beneficial even if he has less stars. While having as much health and damage as possible is desirable, the abilities (such as RG's) can make a world of difference.

-No abilities are hidden at higher ranks, only at higher gear levels. Gear lvl 2 gives you a third ability, level 4 a fourth (if available for the character) and 5 a fifth (only for some characters). You will read some people say that some characters are "only usable if you have 6* or more". This isn't due to hidden abilities, but to trespassing some critical stats. Some characters don't do enough damage under 6* or can't take enough hits, and thus it's not worth using them until they reach that threshold, but from then on, they can completely fulfill their roles. Until then, they're probably more of a burden than they help. On the other hand, when talking about the meta, this is usually expected for the highest ranks (maybe top 50, top 20 even). If you are lower than that, you're probably safe using good characters even if they are slightly undergeared or understarred.

-For synergies, you need experience and tests, or reading a lot. There are 2 types of synergies as well, explicit and implicit. Luminara has an explicit synergy with jedis. She provides stuff to jedis while being in the lead, and takes advantage of lead abilities that impact jedis, because she is one of them. There are subtle, implicit synergies, and this you need to figure out by yourself or read the forums. For example, Royal Guard has a synergy with low hp, high damage characters. Once they get into the yellow, Royal Guard taunt automatically activates, allowing the high damage chars to keep pushing a lot of damage while your opponent is forced to attack RG. Poe has a good implicit synergy with droid teams. Droids are slow but hit very hard. Poe's fast taunt (142 speed) reduces turn meter from all opponents and exposes some of them, allowing your droids to take a turn before your opponent and taking some characters out before your opponent can react.

From your current team, I'd probably do the following:
For GW: Run lumi lead, QGJ, JC, Sid and the last slot decide against each opponent, probably defaulting ig86. You will need the heals from lumi and JC, and Sid self-heal is useful. QGJ brings very good utility. ig86 will deal quite a bit of damage and has another assist to try to do a bit more. This is told in basically every GW thread out there, and I concur. Barris makes GW much, much easier. Farm her if you can, it's really worth it.

For Arena: From your roster I'd probably run:
QGJ (L), Lumi, 86, Phasma and Sid/RP/Dooku (against jedis mainly). Maybe you can swap leads between QGJ, phasma and/or sid for testing, qgj seems to be in decay in favor of phasma in this particular setup.
You can also try dooku lead instead of the others, he is the most common lead for a reason, although at 4* he might be a bit squishy. if you level up his ability, he becomes a nightmare. It doesn't really matter that much that he is squishy if you lead him, though, because the leader ability stays after death.

It's not that the others aren't good, it's that I (personally) consider this would bring the highest results. You can always change whatever and make your own tests. Because it takes so long to farm some gears/shards, you have plenty of time. Unless you are battling for top20 constantly, you're usually pretty safe testing out teams that you might enjoy, it won't make a big difference in the amount of spots you lose overnight. Once you get to the top positions, then that's another story, you can try out stuff, but you might get sent back too many positions to go back to your desired position if you choose a bad squad.

Grendel007

Thanks for taking the time to answer. This helps a lot, and I am going to try out the squads you suggest. I have always like IG-86 and thought it was a good toon, but he just doesn't get talked up a lot.
I am trying to star up my Dooku but I can't unlock his node in Cantina yet so I am stuck with two hard mode nodes. Maybe I will unlock his abilites more and use him as lead anyway.
Maybe I will try an arena team of Dooku(L), Phasma, Lumi, 86, and QGJ and see how it goes. I need to up Dooku's dodge though. If I can crack the top 100 I will be happy for a while. I have heard that ST Han is good if you don't have RG and I have him at 4*, so I am going to work on him also.

I see what you are saying about the hidden abilities and having to be upgraded. I was just saying it that way because of the level requirement before they can be bought. I just upgraded QGJ to where he has the 65% chance to gain 30% TM with his basic attack, and the next upgrade he can remove TM from enemies. This makes him a very powerful character considering all he can do. I think there is a page on this site that lists all the upgraded abilities a toon has.

Thanks again for the help!

darth_suicune

Just a heads up: The new update going live today has reduced a bit the counter-attack power of dooku. While at your level it might still be worth for the rest of traits, I just wanted to point that out, it's not as effective as it was. Still not bad, just have to be slightly more careful against certain targets (leia, st han, maybe rg).

Yeah, STHan is pretty good, especially after the last rebalance, and might have become even better against dooku now (Taunt will intercept counterattacks, dooku's counterattacks are relatively low damage, which means st han can take a few and increase the TM of all your partners substantially while surviving the attacks)

I totally misunderstood your comment about abilities leveling then. Yeah, all characters unlock certain levels of their abilities at the same levels. Most of us use sites like swgohcantina (google that) and the like to check what abilities are worth to level and which aren't so much, so you can focus on the good ones.

Grendel007

Thanks again. I put Dooku as lead in my arena team and lost about 150 spots. That may just be chance but I think I'm going to go w Phasma like you suggested until I get Dooku a bit stronger.