It seems as though my ranked pvp defense stats are pretty dreadful. I know the AI in this game is pretty ridiculous, and not getting the first turn also probably plays a role in it as well. The matches I play in I have roughly 5300 wins and 550 losses or so. And I’d say 90% of the time I attack the strongest team.
But my defenses are roughly 600 wins to 2300 losses. So I imagine a lot of people may have poor defense stats since the dopey AI plays their team wrong, or makes silly moves and such.
I definitely do!
I think the reasons you said explain it pretty well. Also – your own attacking win ratio is even better than your defence ratio is poor – ~10:1 compared to ~1:4. If everyone that played against you won as much, your defence ratio would be even worse!
Also consider the levels (and team power levels) of players attacking you or to whom you are shown.
As of this writing I’m a level 998, with a “team score” of 11,523. I’d say I somewhat consistently beat teams that are anywhere in the 1000 to 1500 level range. Sometimes being in the 15,000 or higher score.
I use 1.) warlord hero (spark rocket weapon to burn enemies, enraged on 4 matches, fire blade is triple against burning enemies, solo attacker still able to hit submerged enemies)
2.)Queen Beetrix (royal honey cleanse, true damage to quickly bring down stronger foes)
3.) Thrall (mana fills quick to power up everyone)
4.) Goblin King (complements queen b, The brown gems queen b creates powers him up, his attack helps eliminate an unneeded color to increase chance of queen b matching 4 and extra turn, also summons extra fodder and attackers if anyone else dies)
It’s really frustrating though, to see my win % stay around 67% or so, just bc my defenses are so bad. But like I was saying, if I’m beating people with levels that high, with very creative and tough teams, I can only imagine that the general majority of players have the same issue. And, I suppose there’s no “true head to head” system. We’re all always just playing against a computer controlled team.
Here’s the thing, when you attack another’s defense team, you know exactly what you want you’re team to do and when you get a terrible board you adjust. You bait the A.I. and even change your strategy, especially when you lose a troop.
I’m guessing that since you’re here asking questions then you played for awhile. If that’s true, you understand how the"dopey" AI works. It’s not the fault of the AI if you expect it to play like you.
You may need to come up with a better defense team, one that works well with the AI. But even then, there is a bit of luck involved.
Don’t forget that lower level players are easy matches for the high-level / end-gamers. And with so many campaign tasks that everyone needs to finish, a level 300 player with stats less than 1/3 of your team is a quick way for a player to kill red enemies / match skulls / use a weapon / play a kingdom team, ect, ect ect…
And even before there were campaign tasks… players get sick of seeing the same opponents & teams over and over and over again. Low level players usually do not have the meta teams as their defense, and even if they do, it’s a much weaker version.
Every team, even some absurd ones on defence (as Yaos/Rope Dart/Beetrix/Zuul/Goblins/whatever other obnoxious meta team will show up in future), has it’s counter. Or many counters. If enemies see your team, they can pick whatever team suits them and their play and which is effective vs your team.
As for:
Putting a simple Obsidious into team, makes your Beetrix and Hero lose their biggest strengths(beetrix cleans on match4, and all Hero traits). Adding up any Water-talent-class, that can frezee on start and/or Frostmage/Maab, will make Beetrix even less usefull. Add empowered converter, maybe doomed weapon or just EoE and you’re good to go…
Enemies can pick any team to counter your def, same as you can pick any team to counter enemy def.
My current stats:
Offense: 5,052W 634L
Defense: 1,381W 2,051L
Pretty happy with my defense’s 40:60, honestly I think reaching a 50:50 ratio is almost impossible due to the factors you and everyone else already mentioned.
A good defense team in my opinion is one able to:
One tip is to look at the best defense stats in the weekly PvP leaderboard, and check what those users are using; you can learn a lot from them.
Of course, none of the above really matters if someone is taking the time to adjust their team to specifically counter yours, thus the perfect defense doesn’t exist; but it’s safe to assume that most of your opponents won’t bother, and here is where some defenses can provide you with better win ratios.
Ok, my current stats from ranked:
Attack: 20132 / 1949
Def: 4346 / 8129
I tend do do my offense and defense with same team I set up as def, depending on the week. (like this week it’s broken spire, so i use warlord with 3 giants 
)
Most of my GW def teams, can erase enemy team (or at least heavily cripple it, by killing 2-3 troops before giving control away) on 1st turn… (assuming enemy will have bad board and won’t do same on his turn)
Been + in Def column for at least 18 months.
Had a period with a Divine defence with 2 Ubastets and Bard hero that did ok. Never ran the Nyx stuff, Justice League or any dual empowered defence.
Most successful defence was one that got copied a bit, still use it, not set at present. Not used L&D on defence.
My defence stats are around 14,000 won / 25,000 lost, but my current defence team is around 100/120 by the end of the week.
This is certainly a factor for low-level players, so as you level up yourself your defence stats are obviously going to improve.
Here’s some long term defense stats:
I don’t try to win defense battles, because as far as I’m concerned, it’s pretty pointless. I try to set defenses that will help people out with campaign tasks, etc. The W/L record is irrelevant.
Is winning defense even worthwhile? Gems are possible, but I think it’s just RNG right?
This is my philosophy, as well. With the AI, plus gnomes and battle crashers, and other reasons stated previously, it’s clear we were never really intended to win defenses anyway. We may as well be good citizens.
I do briefly judge those orbweaver/L&D defences, before I feed them to Ubastet.
Slightly off topic, but I’m more interested in invade engagements versus defense engagements. I’m pretty sure they haven’t used seeded dummy accounts in PvP since they very beginning of the last revamp years ago, so the total number of invade and total number of defends should be roughly the same across the entire playerbase. Yet everyone here that has posted both invade and defense stats has more invades than defends, generally by a wide margin. Same across all my accounts, which all have between a 50% to 70% amount of defends versus number of invades, some which don’t even touch PvP for weeks on end.
Wondering what kind of play pattern and defense you need to have to get more defends than invades over any given period of time and how this relates to the repetitiveness of certain players and certain defense types being seen stuck on repeat.
I notice during GW weeks my alts won’t have defense or attack opponents visible in PvP until I actually fight Ranked PvP battles. So, if my alt has 5 victories the first two days, and 3 defense wins and 7 losses, his defense stats will still show 0/0 until I attack someone in ranked. I don’t remember to check his attack stats prior to Ranked, but I think those are accurate.
I would therefore think that the alt may be in the defense pool, getting crushed by other players, but it doesn’t count against his w/l until he actually participates in ranked. I could be wrong tho.
My DEf has never lost a battle generally speaking of course. 
I would like to see your stats.
Pretty sure Rojo was just joking
If I’m remembering correctly, gems are obtained from PvP defense when cascades happen. My defense team is set up to provide me with cascades - I don’t care about my defense stats.
