As many of you have written about GW has evolved a lot since last November. There has been a lot written about how hard it has become. While I don't disagree that it is very challenging now I wanted to point out a few things that have changed. In the past many people used healers and suicide squads to beat gw. Now they actually hurt your chances to beat gw because of two changes to gw. 1. Carryover of TM and 2. Protection.
1. Carryover of TM. Any TM you ended with in a previous battle carries over. This is true for both you and your opponents. This is why suicide squads are no longer effective. If you use one then when you put back your A team now your opponent has tm that carried over. This hurts your team.
The other thing to note about tm carryover is that it doesn't apply to just your previous battle. So if a toon fought in node 1 and sits out node 2, if you bring him back for node 3 the tm he had in node 1 carries to node 3. This is key. Generally speaking nodes 1 to 4 and nodes 7 to 9 are relatively easy nodes. In those nodes rotate in your 10 best toons.
I use 10 toons for gw. Phasma qgj rey ig86 and gs are my A team and my 5 bench toons are ben sthan rg teebo and elder. Just for reference my arena team is over 40k and I rank 1 in arena. So my strategy is in node 1 i sub in sthan and ben and leave 3 dps toons. Kill them asap and take the least damage and dont use sthan or bens specials. Then node 2 i sub in teeb and elder for ben and han. Then node 3 i start my A team. By now each of my 9 toons have tm meter carryover. Every node each of my toon will go once or even twice before my opponent goes even once. Then i sub in sthan in node 6 to keep my heavy hitters alive. Since you always go first and your whole team goes first you need to strategize who to attack first and avoid things like triggering rg autotaunt.
2. Notice i dont use any healers. Because of protection healers are useless and are a waste of roster space.
Now there are obviously other teams that can beat gw easily. Hope this helps
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Lastly manage your toons cooldowns on their specials.
I use a similar strategy to OP.
Nodes 1-5 (Phasma, Rey, QG, GS, RG): Kill or stun high dps toons first. I usually only take one, maybe 2 hits per node by managing stuns and TM. I try to use basic only on node 5 to make sure all my specials are cooled down for node 6.
Node 6: Send in a suicide squad. My suicide squads are usually 3 toons around L50-60/g7 and 2 toons 35-50/g5 or 6. They just need to have enough health to soak up most or all opposing specials. Send in A team to clean up.
Nodes 7-8: A team kills node 7 ASAP. Node 8 is to cooldown specials for Node 9. Around now, one or more of my A team toons has probably lost all protection. I when that happens, I sub in Lumi for Phasma to make sure the team starts the next node with full health.
Node 9: Suicide squad similar to 6. Lumi is definitely in by this point.
Node 10: No or very weak suicide squad. Use specials in beginning only to kill high dps toons. Latter half of battle is for cool down.
Node 11: Suicide squad similar to 6 followed by B team. For me this is usually Dooku or OB evasion (L), 86, 88, JC, Chewy. I'm just trying to keep 86 and 88 alive long enough to remove protection on two biggest dps threat and set up a Rey OHK, esp if they have RG (and they all do). A Team with Phasma cleans up the rest. I don't worry about finishing with full health or specials cooled down, since I know a weak node 12 is coming.
Node 12: Full auto!
1, RNG in GW is a fixed thing if you don't change the squad or the skill to use. In other words, if your Rey miss her leverage in this round, then she will miss the leverage on anyone in this match, no matter whom you gonna hit. This will change if you use her basic or the triple-hit skill, or sub your roster at least one toon. As a result, player can utilize this design to retreat/sub/change skill order to figure out the best RNG. I normally only need to retreat a few times while I am facing a top arena team in node 6/10/11.
2. Use good stunners, I feel like this is more effective than use more DPS, my arena squad is Phasma/Rey/QGJ/RG/GS, however I will sub GS to daka (potency mod her to 70%-ish) for GW. I will stun the tank/support/old-ben anyone hard to kill in one round first, and let me DPS to kill the glass cannon. Therefore the snapshots are very common for me (with some retreat attempts I described above to figure out the best RNG), THIS IS THE KEY FACTOR I CAN KEEP UNDAMAGED:)
This happens to me daily. I'm running solid squads but gw has always been ridiculous for me. In total I've beat it a whopping 9 times and it's never made sense to me why every strolls and I am fortunate to get to 12...but then lose.
So I appreciate the break down and I'll try it..but apparently in my star wars game...my same level as everyone else's toons (and in some cases more powerful) just somehow consistently. ...every day...underperform.
Don't use your bench toons. Only rotate them in a few at a time to get their tm up. Who are your 10 best toons and their gear levels?
My arena power is around 40k.
I've never lost a GW.
So you're welcome to say whatever inane, foolish things you want, but healers are far from worthless.
Backup characters in roster are Leia for offensive, STHan and Poe as tanks, Teebo, EE and Chirpa maxed from T7 raid running, Fives, and about 20 characters in the 60s and 70s.
I wouldn't say healers are worthless, exactly, but they aren't the first characters I'd bring on a GW run. I find that a calculated offense, some timely stuns and Phasma's awesome VM are key components to consistent victory in this long haul (which only takes me about 25 minutes on the average).
The carryover of TM is very important. It means I get the drop on droid teams and Leia, and with a timely VM I get to attack twice with each character aside from Phasma before I have to deal with one enemy attack.
How often do you heal? Because of protection I cant imagine how you would use heal often. Bariss used to be god of gw before protection but because you can only heal health you would need to burn all your protection for heals to be useful. In my opinion if you lose your protection on most your toons then they are going to die soon because heals are based of health and health generally makes up a smaller percentage than protection.