crappy gear and/or poorly geared based on the 1 champ shown

couple different issues i can see.

1. bad gearing. going based off deliana, you're making the classic beginner mistake of prioritizing set bonuses when you should be focusing on gear with good stats. deliana's hp is fine (honestly, for the level you're at it's quite impressive), but her other important stats (speed, acc, and def) are all way too low. drop the bolster set and get her in gear with good main and substats. for deliana you'll want hp% or def% gloves, hp% or def% chestplate (typically you'll want one of each but an hp type champ like deliana can sometimes get away with hp% on both) and speed boots (barring a few very specific niche builds, every single champion will want speed boots), with as many hp, def, acc, and speed substats as you can get.
2. bad levelling. your biggest issue here is that you have way too many 5* compared to your 6* champions. the difference between 5* and 6* is huge, so making 6* should always be the priority. you've also got a few in there who are useless not worth the resources it would take to rank them up. goremask, slasher, diabolist, hound spawn, and probably muckstalker (he's quite good in the newest dungeon, but thats not somewhere you should be focusing on for a long time yet) can all be used as chickens for your next 6*. you should also try to diversify your champions. half of your 6*s (kael, ronda, and tallia) perform almost exactly the same role. each has some minor utility options, but all three are primarily dps champions. all three are the same affinity as well, so you don't even have the option of switching between them to gain affinity advantage.
3. this one is more of a guess, but team comp is likely an issue as well. you have some good dps and support, but you're lacking in debuffers. beyond that, i'd need to know whom you're running, so feel free to post your team comp as well as their builds.

Perhaps going the poison-way would be a good option. 

You have 2 good poisoners among your champs (Venommage, Frozen Banshee)

Pairing them with some protection (UdK, Toragi) and some healing (Apo or Deliana) might be a good way to beat lvl 17.

But as the others said...you should pay attention to the stats of the champs...Speed and Acc for the poisoners, survivability and speed for the rest 

With poor gear this is the route I took when I was in OP shoes as a n00b.  JUst survive the waves with apo, deliana, udk/jareg and get your poisoner(s) to the boss which will be the easiest part of the fight.

Uh, I thought you to be much older as to have Deliana as a noob..;-) 

But yeah, poison is the way of slow but sure way to farm some good dragon equipment...and OP has very good champs for this...

I could necro my old dragon20 success story, you would probably need to change your pants after laughing so hard at my team... I am guessing it was apothecary, gorgorab, zelotah, grizz jarl, brawler.   Possibly doompriest instead of jarl

so as for team atleast with dragon I'm running what I figured was my strongest which are deliana, ronda, tallia, kael, and apothecary. as for getting more champs to 6 star that's what I was hoping to do just didn't know who. i have a lot of food in my vaults I've been working up some of the champs you mentioned are supposed to be food. reason for there lvl 50 status... 😣👉👈 I kinda was away for a few months and completely zoned on the fact that at 5* I can stop lvling food my bad lol.  also ya muckstalker was purely done to get the new dungeon beat but sadly only got me past lvl 1 there.

thanks i will give that a try and try to get some better gear on them just ill be honest I don't really have a lot of stuff with good stats I feel like I get crap rolls 

That team has no decrease def debuff. The enemies survive longer and hit back more often. I would make Armina the next lvl 60 at your account. Decrease def on all enemies is crucial for nearly every content in the game, you need a champ with that debuff.

From the things you wrote, I fear you want to use all unascended rank 5 champs as food. I would definetly not use High Khatun and Bellower for this, they are good champs. I would further not use Goremask as food. It will never be used as a champ, but that dog is part of the Rhazin fusion. Be carefull before you feed any champ with the fusion symbol.

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I was able to do it easily with Deliana, Ronda, UDK, Apocathery, and Geomancer.

with a little modifications here and there when needed I managed with some of the suggestions and recommendations to get to and beat 20 thank you all so much. still need to work on gear and still need to level up a couple of the suggestions but happy to finally be up to lvl 20 so thank you all 

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