Frontline is Hot garbage.

[Avenger]

I usually enjoy Onsal Hakair, Fields of Glory/Shatter, and Seal Rock. (Secure not so much - it seems to drag.) Obtaining all of the Frontline mounts is really what got me into PvP and I still enjoy playing!

Since Patch 6.1 few people in a match seem to know how to play and the matches I've been in have been messy – which is exactly what you'd expect since 1) the skills have all changed and 2) many new players are playing.

On the other hand, occasionally people start paying attention or figuring out what is going on, and then things can get interesting.

I think they scrapped the fifth Frontline mode - Slaughter - because it simply didn't work. However I wonder if some of that was due to bugs and system limits which have since been fixed (I remember things like character models not appearing, etc. and just not being able to see or do anything in that mode.)

I'm in favor of keeping all existing Frontline modes - even Secure, though I don't personally enjoy it very much.

I also hope they can bring back Rival Wings/Hidden Gorge because it was a good PvP mode as well. I'd be in favor of mixing it into a new PvP roulette.

[ReiganCross]

Slaughter would be just like a slugfest without anything to cap or fight over?

That sounds kind of monotonous, like you'd just pick your frontline and stick to it forever without ever swapping your objective...

[Masenko]

Frontline is awful.
My overall performance is 82/93/78, which is close enough to evenly split that I'm convinced putting in effort does absolutely nothing.
Everyone should join and then just stand there and we'd all get a first place tie.
Buck the system.

[Cidel]

This has always been sort of a lazy weird "thing" when it comes to whoever is in charge of designing the PvP. Very seldom do they (if ever) make an adjustment or balance PvP abilities to behave differently between their small-scale Feast to be separate from their 72-man Frontlines modes. They almost never make adjustments based on behaviors of Frontlines; only when absolutely necessary (and believe me, right now is necessary). All of their (initial) design decisions have usually always revolved around how the jobs behave and perform around small-scale situations, with little forsight to how it translates to large-scale.

Back when Secure was the only Frontlines mode (and everyone still had their PvE toolkit), parties full of WHMs stood on the flag zones and spammed Medica II on themselves; every HoT stacked and they essentially became unkillable outside of extremely coordinated bursts on 1 target. And between Medica II spam? Holy spam. And it took them a while to decide to restrict people to just 1 HoT of each type, and until they did, some people abused the heck out of this strategy.

It's also pretty fitting that talk about Slaughter came up, because during this time, it was a common strat for people (especially premades) to stack their teams with BLMs and SMNs, and Sleepga/Tri-bind entire enemy teams and stacking their (at the time) OP Limit Break circles, usually 3-4+ at a time on the heart of an enemy group. No less than at least half a dozen people died every time. Not too unlike what SMNs and WHMs do now.

They've always dragged their feet on addressing "cheese" strats that involves stacking up on jobs that are oppressive in groups. I will honestly be shocked if these oversights in Frontlines will be addressed within the next couple weeks, let alone before the next major patch. Even minor adjustments like increasing the time LBs take to fill in only Frontlines duties, or creating a caveat that only one of each type of DoT can be active on someone in PvP (which does not affect Crystal Conflict, at all) would do wonders to curb these job-stacking strats.

Edit: I see maintenance scheduled for the 25th; if it's not addressed here, I don't think it will be in any timely matter.

Slaughter would be just like a slugfest without anything to cap or fight over?

That sounds kind of monotonous, like you'd just pick your frontline and stick to it forever without ever swapping your objective...

It was literally the same map as Secure, no flags, and a giant trampoline/jump pad from each team's base near where the flags used to be taking you directly to the top of your team's ramp in the middle area. Nodes still spawned at set intervals like Secure that were still just point piñatas. It was a massively copied/pasted Secure but people were glad that the focus wasn't running around capping bases. low-man Slaughter was actually the most enjoyable between all potential 24-mans, but unfortunately they suddenly cut this mode.

[Cpt_Jack_Irons]

i do agree that frontline has way too many players in it and every major engagement is dicated by how many LB's can be spammed in the cluster of players

boy i love joining in this fight only for us to be killed easily as the enemy summoners summoned 3 bahamuts on top of us

[Drium]

Frontline is in fact hot garbage right now. If you don't show up as a summoner or white mage you are actively sabotaging your team's chances of winning. Doubly so if you show up as melee.

Arguments can be made that all of the healers are viable, machinist, black mage, red mage, dancer etc. But melee is universally pointless in Frontline, and whichever team has the most summoners and white mages wins. Every time.

[VictorSpoils]

Frontline is in fact hot garbage right now. If you don't show up as a summoner or white mage you are actively sabotaging your team's chances of winning. Doubly so if you show up as melee.

Arguments can be made that all of the healers are viable, machinist, black mage, red mage, dancer etc. But melee is universally pointless in Frontline, and whichever team has the most summoners and white mages wins. Every time.

DRG/SAM/NIN regularly top the leaderboards while SGE/AST/MCH/BLM/RDM/DNC barely ever contribute heavily.

[Avenger]

Slaughter would be just like a slugfest without anything to cap or fight over?

That sounds kind of monotonous, like you'd just pick your frontline and stick to it forever without ever swapping your objective...

Whenever I played 72p Slaughter that's exactly what happened - everyone just converged in the middle and never moved. It was like the middle platform of Secure without any interceptor drones. Since there were so many characters in the same area most of them would never even appear on screen, so you couldn't target anything and I would just spam AOE, moving around randomly if I seemed to be hit repeatedly. I'm not sure it actually qualified as a game, but it was an experience.

It's possible that you could get buffs or some advantage by moving to a different area, but I never saw that happen.

[TheTyrant]

The changes ruined frontlines. Not much need for in-depth analysis.

[Vencio]

I dont usually post on the forums but I feel like this has literally pushed me over the edge. CC is great, it is fast paced and enjoyable. AT high rankings you have matches that could go either way and you feel like you contribute to the team performance. Frontlines on the other hand is absolute garbage. It is a zergfest with no direction. The fact that nodes spawn randomly makes it even worse, as you could be winning at one point and random RNG spawns could turn everything around and it would be impossible to recover. Another point is that the losing team could just give up and decide to troll the winning team at that point making it so that the second best wins.

The fact that you NEED 10 wins for the Garo mount is a total joke. I would take another 30 more wins of CC instead of the 10 for frontline any day. Heck make it another 60 wins of CC and it would still be better.

The new abilities totally to not fit this mode at all. Please either balance Frontlines, or remove it from the Garo event completely.

Git gut?

Enough said