A strategy that works for me is the standard giant-healer attack. Find and take out the air defense close to you by distracting the defenses with a couple troops, use a few wall-breakers to break the wall. Then send as many giants as needed to take out the air defense. Then you can deploy the healer and the giants will destroy most of the defenses with nearly no trouble, provided no air defenses. However, problems can often arise with this strategy. The wall breakers could die, the giants could switch to a different target. In the event of this, I find a healing spell as a good way to keep the giants alive until it is safe to deploy the healer. Place it in the spot the giants will go, or in the center of them if there attacking. For clan castle troops, a few troops will do the job. Usually a lightning spell can quickly kill a mob of archers/barbarians. Even if the air defense is still there, deploy the healer as far from it as possible. YOU NEED THOSE GIANTS! Anyway, once the defenses somewhere are taken out, deploy archers or barbs to take out some stuff. If something is out of range of a defense, shoot it down. I have used this strategy for a month, and it is very effective. I have not lost one battle since I started doing this. Understand this works differently for everyone. Hope this helps.
It is SUPER easy to make a lot of Gold/Elixir and a modest amount of Dark ( you won't be rolling in it, but it will build up slowly )
Trophy Range, Stay between 1900 -> 2100. This is Crystal III, with 35k bonus of Gold/Elixir and 100 Dark.
Basically Town Hall Snipe your way to this trophy range ( attack bases with town halls on the side with a few archers, but have an army to back them up just in case they have hidden teslas, etc). Once you get to 2000, you don't want to lose your Crystal III status, which happens if you go below 1900.
At this trophy range you'll find a good supply of side town halls, and people loaded with loot. at th9 and th10, it is very hard to protect all the collectors, so they are often on the outside of the walls, covered by archer towers and canons.
Your strategy is to snipe town halls whenever you can, getting your 35k bonuses. But to also find bases where the collectors are full ( learn to recognize the inside of elixir collectors full level, and the gold has a box outside that fills with coins ) and compare it to how much is in storage. If they have 300k available and their storage looks low, and the collectors look full. Its time to attack! Doesn't matter if its a side town hall or not. You don't care about getting the win, just the loot. Time to Attack!
for Attacking we are going to go with BAM - Barbs, Archers, Minions. Super CHEAP to train, super FAST to train. every single barracks will be producing units very quickly. Don't worry about spells too much, but a rage spell on hand can be useful. Both Dark Barracks queue up minions, 2 barracks dedicated to barbs and 2 dedicated to archers. Just keep them constantly queued up. The ratios between troops doesn't matter too much.
Now the trick is, use as few troops as possible... for collectors on the outside, put just enough barbs in to take them down, for collectors over the wall, use archers, and once they are getting used up and there is still more loot, use minions. Once you've taken down the collectors, end your battle. Don't try for storage unless its placed in an unprotected place. If you only use 80 - 100 troops to do this, you'll be ready to find another battle straight away after this attack, and because this loadout trains fast, you almost never run out of troops unless you find a super juicy base that you throw all your troops at.
Your barb king ( and queen if you are at TH9) are just there as backup or to help with sniping THs.
You can EASILY make 150k to 300k doing this. You will lose trophys, but just snipe your way back to 2000. In an hour or two you can make several million.
This works well for people at TH8 and TH9. You will make so much loot that most of the time your builders/lab will be busy and you will have nothing to spend it on.
This is a good time to take a break from farming and practice your war attacks, queue up some expensive troops ( you are rich now! you don't care about making a profit on these attacks ). Try out All Drags, or GoWipe, and experiment with all kinds of combos. Then when you drain your Gold/Elixir a bit, go back to your farming strategy.
Best Answer
GOWIPE is definitely a good strategy at TH8. When I maxed my troops at TH8 I used it to loot Dark Elixir, worked well.
You will definitely see a big difference when you use level 5 wiz, they are meant to do a lot of work together with the PEKKAs, so having them at a higher level will help.
Consideration: do not drop all your troops at once, PEKKAS do not have a favourite target so they may instead go wiping out perimeter buildings instead of going for the centre. So clear up some space using some wizards first, or even some archers. After that you can safely drop your PEKKAs and king to funnel them towards the core/loot.
Another strategy is dragons with three lightning spells. If you plan out your attack well you can always get at least a two star, and 3 star on non tricky bases. This strategy is elixir hungry so would recommend it for war or trophy pushing and not farming.