Competitive doesn't mean it has to be an esport. Checkers is a competitive game. Any game where you are directly competing against other players is, by definition, a competitive game. Frontlines aren't "competitive" like Starcraft or something, but you still need to design and tune them around the assumption that everyone has at least some level of baseline competency and that everyone is playing to win. I don't think SE does remotely enough on those latter bits, and I wish to hell they had the huevos to actually do something about it - dramatically reduce 2nd and 3rd place rewards, and pile them into 1st place. Then add in tutorials and maybe "custom game" options (minimum 8v8v8) so that we have the option to actually teach players that genuinely want to learn how to play the mode. A lot of FL, at the simplest level, comes down to being able to fight effectively... but how are you going to learn without practicing? And how can you ask questions, receive feedback, etc in DF? There's no pausing, no option to re-queue with the same people, etc.

SE needs to get off their asses and work on that. They put all that wasted effort into Fellowships or whatever, but they can't bother to make it so that we can actually train people in PvP? Imagine if the only way you could raid was through Duty Finder and lockouts were 30 minutes instead of 90 minutes, it'd be a complete shitshow. But that's what Frontlines is.

I do think tanks should have higher DR. I'd do 15% melee and 30% tank and see where that gets us. No DR for ranged or casters. No global damage penalties. Double LB charge timers (1.75x for 2nd, 1.50x for 3rd.) Purify and Guard both reduced to 20 sec. Gain LB charge for kills made within 20yd of an objective (*active* ice, tomelith, etc), for participation on objectives (1 point of LB charge for every X% of damage dealt to ice or robots, etc), and for being within 20yd of objectives when your team secures them. Killing someone with Battle High should give you 1 point of LB charge per rank of Battle High they possess, with assists giving half of that value rounded down (so +1 to assists on BH2-3, +2 for BH4-5.)

You'd also need to add AOE damage fall-off. I'd start with 40% damage reduction for LBs after the first target ("the first target" being the closest target to the center of the AOE or the closest to your position when you used the LB, for ones that do not have direct targeting), and 20% reduction for normal skills.

Understand, I think that if you run at 15 enemy players, you should die in short order. I don't care what class you are playing. No one should be able to tank 15 players for any meaningful amount of time without *serious* assistance from their team. At best, they should hope to live long enough to soak some spells and distract enemy players so their team can get a good initiation on them. I think that FL maps might need an overall rework to increase the number of active objectives somewhat, to discourage clumping and zerging. I think AOE should be powerful and it should be a strong deterrent to zerging in a big blob, but in many cases the map designs *enforce* clumping. I don't mean chokepoints, I mean that there are typically only a few active objectives at any time, which means that splitting up often isn't feasible.

I think fixing the maps might fix FL as a whole without even needing a lot of balance tweaking, to be honest.