I am currently at a level 469 and my “Hero” has 51 life, 40 shield, and 24 attack. Why is it that when I go into the arena it cuts all of that in half making everything just an unfair advantage?
You don’t get any bonuses other than the 10% weekly event buffs within Arena. It’s actually for fairness purposes, to allow accounts with different progression to meet in a roughly equal playing field.
I don’t expect any buffs in the arena. The buffs should only be during PvP and team buffs during guild events. But with that being said are you saying that my hero base line is half of what I see no matter what I show in my regular makeup? And with that more then why don’t they increase a little when you choose a harder difficulty?
You dont receive the usual increase from kingdoms etc, only lvl up stats. But you should only normally be 1 or 2 stat difference from your opponents hero due to how it matches people up. As for harder difficulty, if the buffed you and them then it wouldnt really be harder would it? It would be relative. I hope this helps explain a little, if you need more please feel free to ask 
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Depending on your progression your hero base line might not even be a third. You get bonus stats for each kingdom at level 10, and additional bonus stats for each kingdom reaching five stars. You get a very significant stat boost for your hero class, which also isn’t enabled within Arena. There’s also guild statues that can provide extra stats. I think the hero screen has a detailed breakdown somewhere.
It’s the other way around, increasing difficulty boosts the stats for your opponent, e.g. playing on Hard causes their stats to increase by 10%.
Arena is a cluster of well-intentioned philosophical choices with contradictory implementation.
The idea is supposed to be, “Everyone in Arena is at the same level, there are no advantages based on player progression.” But that’s not how it’s implemented, as the Saga of Dawnbringer in Arena showed. I’ve never been able to figure out exactly what does and doesn’t apply in Arena, so I’ll lay it out as I understand it based on what I have seen and what people have said in this thread.
- Good: all troops in Arena are set to level 15, regardless of whether you have or haven’t leveled them that far.
- Good: all troops in Arena have no traits.
- Bad: your level-based hero stats are applied.
- Bad: you can access all hero weapons.
- Good: kingdom-based and guild-based hero stats are not applied.
- Questionable: one specific too-strong hero weapon is replaced on defense teams with one from a random set of strong hero weapons.
- Good: below level 200, the pool of players/weapons you will face is limited in an unknown manner.
This means that Arena doesn’t completely realize its vision. High-leveled players have access to weapons that make them both stronger on offense and stronger on defense than new players. This is most obvious when you compare starter weapons to higher-leveled weapons like Black Manacles or Kingslayer. The most extreme example is Runic Blade, which is the #2 most powerful weapon behind Dawnbringer. Dawnbringer itself was a problem for more than six months. It’s a weapon that requires 1.3 million souls to craft, and it was roughly 30% of Arena defense teams before a hasty fix was applied.
The stat boosts are somewhat mitigated by the level gate. The higher your level, the further apart the stat boosts become. So players past level 200 aren’t at quite as high a disadvantage vs. a level 400 player as a level 1 vs. 100 player would be. It’s still a disadvantage, though, so this is a questionable situation.
So in short, Arena is meant to be a level playing field, but the mechanics of hero statistics gives higher-leveled players some advantages over lower-leveled players. This is kind of goofy, because winning on defense in Arena has no effect on your gameplay. That said, the evening of troop statistics can make it more profitable/fun than PVP for players without a consistent PvP team. The “unlevel” nature of it just heightens how bad “bad” teams are.
Keep in mind you only need about 2 wins to break even. When I was lower than level 400, I think I had more “break even” matches than profitable ones. That was more due to “the draft gave me no good choices” than “my opponent has stats that are too high”. The hero is often (and meant to be) the toughest troop to deal with on the team.
edit
I forgot the question about the difficulty slider. This is another goofy aspect of arena. Difficulty in GoW always scales opponent stats, never yours. It’s not meant to keep things “fair”. Due to the rest of the adjustments Arena makes, it’s almost never profitable to increase the difficulty in this mode. Beating it on higher difficulties is a “bragging rights for skilled players” kind of thing.