Frontlines is an Unbearable Experience Now

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Originally Posted by Zachia

Outside of the roulette i avoid frontlines like a plague. I've noticed there to be many issues with a lot of the pvp styled games / maps on top of how matches are pretty much decided on who has the most summoners. Crystal Conflict is probably the most balanced and fun of all the types of pvp FF14 has to offer. By the looks of this thread however many seem to enjoy the chaos that is frontlines and if thats their thing they can go for it.

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I prefer more fights with many people in it but it is also a hope that Rival Wings gets revived since it is a decent number with only 2 teams rather than the 3 mess.
5v5 sadly bores me even though I do not mind the CC mode itself. I prefer 8 to 10 players in a team...
I would still comeback just to get the 200 wins CC mount but and in a long run maybeeee the Rhalgr title with melee kills, luckily matches are not long aside some overtime

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Originally Posted by Divinemights

The solution is always to not give them that chance.
If you are paying attention, it is always DRK that setup kills for that group AOE.
Always mark opposite team's DRK and CC them when they are about to move it (if your range dont tunnel vision into trigger happy)

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i'll genuily try to become more aware of that, tnx for the suggestion.

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Originally Posted by Zachia

Outside of the roulette i avoid frontlines like a plague. I've noticed there to be many issues with a lot of the pvp styled games / maps on top of how matches are pretty much decided on who has the most summoners. Crystal Conflict is probably the most balanced and fun of all the types of pvp FF14 has to offer. By the looks of this thread however many seem to enjoy the chaos that is frontlines and if thats their thing they can go for it.

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Summoner isn't really an issue. Ironically I've seen a lot fewer SMN these past couple weeks. Maybe it's because people are getting better at dealing with them, or maybe it's people getting bored of playing SMN. I think the biggest issue people struggle with is not understanding/refusing to understand that LBs mean that a lot of nodes are literally not worth even attempting to contest if you didn't get there first. Like in Seal Rock or Onsal Hakair, if the enemy team arrives before you on an easily defended point like mid, you should just plain ignore the node - you'll lose tons of people trying to push it, to the point that even if you take the node you won't have gained that many points... you'd probably gain more points by taking control of a less-defended B rank node. This was already the case in 5.4, but it's even moreso now. Lots of classes have powerful AOE, particularly with LBs, so anywhere where your players are forced to stack up is a terrible place to be.

I play BRD, NIN, WAR, MNK, and three of the four healers regularly in FL. I do not ever have issues dying to AOE spam - because I just straight up avoid putting myself in positions where I'll be caught in it. Remember that you gain points for kills and you lose them for deaths, so losing 10 players to get an A rank is basically just breaking even. Better to just let them have the A rank and focus on picking off stragglers from the other teams and going for less-defended nodes.

It's extremely unpleasant as Melee.

So much so, that I've taken 10 minutes to slam out this frustrated assessment of my own experiences after frankly way too many Frontline matches stubbornly played as various Melee Jobs.

I know that some swaggering all-star is going to come in and ramble about "skill" and blah blah, and bluntly, I do believe that it's possible for people to excel as Melee in frontline. The handful of melee that end up with BH5, and keep it the entire match, makes that clear.

However, it seems relatively rare to me. And I think that's because of the immensely increased burden of attention and awareness on Melee in this mode. Sometimes you literally just have to get lucky, because even cunning BH4/5 enemy Melee get vaporized within seconds if they're caught out-of-position for even a moment.

Which, in fact, is part of what makes it so unfun — the value of BH makes it so that, rather than being rewarded for diving and leading for your team, you're more often rewarded for just lingering malignantly at the edges and poking at the enemy enough to rack up Assists, then playing ultra-cautiously for the rest of the match, since the higher BH ranks paint a target on your head the moment you get anywhere near the enemy deathball.

So I'm trying to differentiate between "impossible" and "unpleasant". It seems very possible to do well as Melee, it's just not pleasant. I feel tense and exhausted vs. relaxing and having fun, because even a split-second of moving in the wrong direction means it's just near-instantly "over".


As Reaper, for example, I'm "designed" to stack an annoying and tedious number of damage enhancements and then dive in, burst, and then evacuate with Regress. This works great in small-team skirmishes such as tiny fringe crystals in Shatter, and is genuinely fun.

However, once the game devolves into giant groups crashing against each other, the gameplay breaks down. Diving in toward vulnerable or high-priority targets becomes nearly-impossible, because even with Purify ready, I'm locked down so hard that I can't do anything, thanks to things like Silence spam, Monk LB, Freeze, etc. "The Purify... it does nothing".

Guard barely helps either, because by the time FFXIV's servers/engine/whatever realises you pressed Guard, you're already way past half-dead. Then some Ninja finishes you off instantly. Alternatively, you try to heal up first, at which point you get spammed with some CC that prevents Guard, or yanked back by a Warrior, and then you KO anyway.

So Guard is really only effective when you use it preemptively... at which point you're basically just CC'ing yourself while you slowly drift back into your team's ball. Maybe you drew the attacks of a few clueless and impulsive players, but otherwise, you basically just simulated Super Monkey Ball and then went home.

So the only viable tactic in most cases is to just miserably nibble at the few players who drift out into the fringes of their group... but even then, all it takes is for my own team to decide to fall back at just the wrong time, and I'm surrounded like a particle being eaten by an amoeba.

Even if you can get in safely, the sheer amount of setup is ridiculously out-of-touch with how fast the situation changes — Arcane Crest, Death Warrant, a bunch of melee GCDs, a castbar... by the time half of this goes out, the opportunity to strike is long gone. So what should be a satisfying combo ends up just being constant half-finished ideas.

LB being a radial Hysteria is supposedly powerful, but frankly, in actual practice, it usually ends up just sending the target to safety in the opposite direction of my team, unless I deliberately overextend to send them in the correct direction... in which case I'm usually deep enough that it becomes a trade, rather than a gain. So in most cases, the Hysteria is only hypothetically-powerful, and in practice, has little real effect.

It does have some uses for assassinating people trying to Guard, but, uh, I could also just play Ninja... or Monk... or even Machinist, and do a far better job of that.

Then it's almost never practical to finish the full 5 stacks of the Shroud buff, especially with everyone being advertised to kill you by the ugly dishrag cosplay, so LB ends up being "Annoy one person, or risk overextending to annoy several... then cast a pathetic Communio on someone who remains in range long enough for the castbar to finish".

Melee in Frontline just feels like maximum-risk, minimum-reward, because you don't end up doing any more damage than Ranged, yet you expose yourself to significantly higher chance of KO (losing points for your team, and also your BH, making you even weaker).

Anyway, I want to clarify that players who just have that "certain instinct" for Melee in Frontline can still do well, as evidence by their BH and end-of-match damage totals. But I see these players very rarely, leading me to guess that the vast majority of people attempting to play Melee in Frontline really are not having much fun.

Personally, I attribute that primarily to the unlimited CC durations and overabundance of cheaply-available control tools. The general PvP Melee formula of diving in, bursting, and getting out just does not work when your HP vaporizes within seconds, and you can be chain-CC'd so heavily that you might as well unplug your keyboard once you gain the enemy team's attention. This is all on top of the death-blobs of Frontline having far too many tools to either lock you out of Purify, break your Guard, or take away control of your character for long enough that you can't Recuperate... meaning that what should be your "failsafe" backup plans usually don't exist in a practical sense.

I think that Melee would be a lot more fun in Frontline if it could somehow just last longer, and get out more safely, when diving. The danger should be remaining in Melee for too long, overstaying your welcome and getting worn down... but right now, the danger is often just entering melee range of a target at all, which... is... not very fun as a "Melee" Job.

Hot take - if you "dive" into a group of 4+ people and they actually turn around to hit you - you are supposed to get vaporized. You are not the main protagonist of a Warriors game. This is simply good balance. Otherwise jobs that can deal with such skewed odds become nigh unlikable in more balanced match ups.

I do not think this patch the Damage done on the scoreboard has any real meaning
Especially this patch has changed meta from burst into synergy between actions

Might be but most times you dont have much choice as ppl dont get the concept of sticking together....

so much anger over pvp so many sore losers pvp is for those who want to play not to just cry about when they lose.

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Originally Posted by Azuri

Hot take - if you "dive" into a group of 4+ people and they actually turn around to hit you - you are supposed to get vaporized. You are not the main protagonist of a Warriors game. This is simply good balance. Otherwise jobs that can deal with such skewed odds become nigh unlikable in more balanced match ups.

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Yeah, I'm not really sure where they're going with these complaints. Even in 5.4, if you dove the enemy team and decided to stick around, you were going to get splattered all over the hillside. Even multiple healers wouldn't keep you up vs 10 people pounding on you, especially not if you had healing down. DRG was incredibly OP, but the reason it was OP was because it could dive in, delete someone, and then immediately escape with EJ, combined with melee DR being too high in general. There were *no* melee classes that could just run right into a big group of players and *stay* there.

I don't know if it's short memory or grass is greener or what. Melee are mostly fine in FL right now, but you *do* need to be picky about when and where you engage, especially if you lack an easy means of bailing out of a fight (most classes except for NIN and RPR.)

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Originally Posted by Gserpent

As has been said in other threads, JP players do not have issues dealing with SMN and, in fact, tend to regard the class as somewhat weak (BLM is apparently much more of an issue for them, and I would tend to agree.) JP players are also well known to be *far* better than EU and NA players at FL, so it's probably not a coincidence that strong players don't really find SMN bothersome while weak ones do.

I do think that 1v1v1 is a stupid format, but there's no way they're going to change it. Not for FL.

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I wonder if its because unlike JP players, our FL is full of people just being happy to lose at content and get a runner-up medal (And bitch at anyone trying to take it seriously)

Do wish we'd have active GMs looking at people throwing matches/refusing to participate though.

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Originally Posted by Kuroka

Yes since the changes i havend done much FL anymore... its just no fun... and we need to swtich to 2 teams per match, if its 1:1:1 the last team will just give up to loose faster and hope is lost - sure, sometimes theres a comeback but overall... you just cant balance that.

Any of the maps would work with 2 groups as well, take the CC groups and be done.

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I'm all for 24v24, would make the matches go longer in to the night, would increase win ratios too. Would also destroy the whole North v South in Seal Rock whilst west just claimes everything. Unfortunatly it won't happen as they'd need to remake the maps from the ground up

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Originally Posted by Asuka-Hykiri

I wonder if its because unlike JP players, our FL is full of people just being happy to lose at content and get a runner-up medal (And bitch at anyone trying to take it seriously)

Do wish we'd have active GMs looking at people throwing matches/refusing to participate though.

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It's a nice idea, but how do you *prove* someone is goldbricking unless they're stupid enough to say they are in chat or some other place where GMs can see it?