Disruptive Frontline Gameplay

[Cidel]

I don't take much stock in threads created by freshly-made accounts that jump right into hot-button issues that already oversaturate their respective Forums, since that is the M.O. of a couple of the notorious sock-puppeteers here, but I did want to respond to a few points made in the thread.

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...Premade => job stacking + DRK(CC) is the biggest issue,

I agree with a lot of what you posted, but this part especially. Easily the biggest offender of FL frustration stems from an incredibly simplistic 2-ability maneuver from DRK leading to a concentrated target for a pile of enemies to be wiped out in a couple seconds. My opinions aside on the reactable-ness and management to the combo, the vast majority of the people queuing FL do not know how to deal with it as it requires very specific awareness and reaction; something most people trained on the PvE hamster wheel sorely lack. If the draw-in is capped to 5/nerfed/etc. or just general DRK adjustments are made, the problem goes away.

...Maybe make it so u can't enter more than 1-2 of the same job

Note: Battle High buff (BH) is also the reason why many jobs are broken,

I disagree with these though. Excluding people from participating based on what's their favorite job (or maybe their only job) will do more harm than good.

Battle High is what's supposed to incentivize people to actually PvP and stay alive. It's a killstreak bonus. That's why they made even Assists a thing. I can get Battle Fever off of even only a couple of kills and the rest being assists because staying alive and even just tagging targets that (eventually) die are counted. It's less about BH being broken and more about people crying sour grapes because they aren't skilled enough to progress and maintain it.

The fact that FL draws in so many clueless people who are just here for their quick XP, the general western mentality about doing minimal (mental) effort is a bigger issue imo.

Agreed.

Guard should probably also be reworked to activate when pressed and not years later after all enemy damage has registered...

It's unfortunately the same issue that makes so many people irritated with the Fallguys event. The netcode snapshots are the problem. Because of it you can still die even if it shows you hovering in your bubble for almost a full second because everything else killing you registered before you reacted. In short, there's nothing they can likely do.

I don't just mean it for the mentioned jobs, but across the board. The idea would be having them double the CD on them but you can lower it by 20% for every BH level you get or something.

No, it should be the opposite. For every level of Battle High you go up, the LB gauge should be slowing down. Unnoticeable at 20-40%, but takes twice as long if you are sitting at Battle Fever or even 80%. I say if you can get high levels of BH, you shouldn't get frequent LBs as a crutch to snowball your already increased damage and healing bonuses.


And yes, LB gauges shouldn't be charging for free in FL. If you aren't actively engaged in battle, you shouldn't be accumulating it. Part of the reason why DRK+DRG is a thing is because they can have their LBs up and ready at nearly every major objective interval just by traveling from one side of the map to the other.

[Jettinson]

It is even very boring to be on the team of those guys... seriously starting to just walking into the other direction or posting markers at different spots instead, because it is talentless grinding like that... also the spam macro text gets on everyones nerves as well and for me a degree I just report it as spam from time to time.

I like to put an effort and feel ike having done an effort to win these rounds, not just following a couple of clowns around seriously exploiting the game that does not only ruin it for the opponents, but also their own team mates.

You being an actual griefer because you are drowning yourself in annoyance and can't differentiate between game balance to actual communication is what annoys me the most in FL.
Macro text etc have been a thing way before this, did you used to report people that had a macro for Borderlands timer or those that put an A near the base as a way of gathering?
I already had a person like you harass people by unmarking constantly in my team and he got kicked.

I wouldn't be surprised if Rival Wings ever got added in Roulette and you will come here and magically saying how certain comps are exploiting the game, give a break

[Themarvin]

You being an actual griefer because you are drowning yourself in annoyance and can't differentiate between game balance to actual communication is what annoys me the most in FL.
Macro text etc have been a thing way before this, did you used to report people that had a macro for Borderlands timer or those that put an A near the base as a way of gathering?
I already had a person like you harass people by unmarking constantly in my team and he got kicked.

I wouldn't be surprised if Rival Wings ever got added in Roulette and you will come here and magically saying how certain comps are exploiting the game, give a break

There is no point in following the no skill train whenever it get to it... the only difficulty about that train in a figure of speech and in reality is beating that takes skill, and nope guard is really not the optimal option for it either.... in each mode there is objectives in Frontline, doing those and doing them successfully, thinking that this current thign is awesome is like the WHM exploit that was there quite some time ago that just wasted loads of people in bottleneck regions.

[Zairava]

There is no point in following the no skill train whenever it get to it... the only difficulty about that train in a figure of speech and in reality is beating that takes skill, and nope guard is really not the optimal option for it either.... in each mode there is objectives in Frontline, doing those and doing them successfully, thinking that this current thign is awesome is like the WHM exploit that was there quite some time ago that just wasted loads of people in bottleneck regions.

There is no "optimal" option for anything because everything has counter-play by one job or another. Strictly speaking, yes Guard is counter-play to DRK pulling you in to become mincemeat by a premade. You aren't countering that unless you have jobs that either remove it or kill you through Guard.

Just following the object of "go here, get node" will only result in your team getting slaughtered by the other two since you decided to not fight and therefore have no one with high enough battle high to tank or kill even non-coordinated comps.

[Mistress_Irika]

My simple solution would be to keep the limit breaks from charging outside of battles. It's not a complete fix to OP's issue. However, it'll definitely force DRKs and other nuke classes to approach differently and actually fight without their LBs to immediately fall on right away.

As for those asking about the issue of battle high it does need a revisit, especially if we're going to continue to have the limit breaks charge outside of battle. Back then, if you died with battle high you had to start over building it. Additionally, teams got additional points for a shut down. People started complaining about having to start over and earning battle high through last hitting players, and now you have what you have snatching the bonus points away as a balance trade off. Now you rewarded way more for going on the offense in team fights instead of defending, and battle high is offering even more power to go on the offensive. I find myself getting hit with 44k LB from DRGs and now 50k LB from MCHs in CC every time an AST is present. Imagine adding BH values to this.

Yes because the method using is griefing both your alliance and the alliances you are up against, cordination to a degree is nice, but not like this, the game should be about feeling to having put in an effort, not to spend time feeding a few peoples score in a figure of speech.

Fights should be interesting, somewhat close, just using the best exploit available is the typical western mentality, where as respect for the players you are with as well as the opponents is an entire different story.

This is an abomination tactics, no matter how you are looking on it, and if you can't see that for yourself, then there is a serious problem.

There is no sabotage in going the other direction, as long as you go towards the goals, the only actual sabotage is if you just AFK somewhere.

I would rather have some sort of coordination in team fights than to be free blasting as a zerg, get nuked minutes later, and surrender at 7 minutes because the entire alliance lost at an S rank objective. It's bad enough that the "let them fight" religion is still going strong. Getting rid or premades is actually going to force people to rely on zerging and ultimately lead to more situations listed when dealing with high valued objectives. After all, I'm pretty certain that most players will still hard tunnel on an S rank while ignoring the other objectives spawning around them and sometimes the 3rd party entirely.

[DendrielConcade]

None of this shit will change meaningfully until they do their comically large 7.0 patch that fixes things prior and loads a fuck ton more problems in. You'd think it would be easy for them to handle this shit via number tweaks and gameplay tweaks(Can't charge Limit unless in combat For Frontline, Battle High getting canned or tweaked to not be as heavily impactful as it is, and tweak the Damage Taken by certain classes like DRG having a comically high 50% when it should be like 25%) but noooooo, none of this shit changes in meaningful ways in reasonable times to actually shirk these issues. PvP is a side thing that thankfully for once we're getting more gear for playing it but its also attached to something thats less than ideal to play anyways, I will forever bitch about CC being Push in Overwatch 2 except even more balanced than that shitshow of a game but least the matches are brief in time.

[maximesan514]

they are farming 1k wins achievements, its not about to stop. fyi

[Nubrication]

There are groups running around as a DRK, AST, AST, AST in frontlines, and its very disruptive to normal frontline matches. When this team operates they can down a full alliance without much counter play, and there are several groups, on multiple Data Centers, that are abusing this to make other players have less fun. On Crystal, other players from Aether travel here to do it, and no one likes to see them in the game because of what they do.

This Class-Combo is actively making the frontline game mode unfun when they appear, and its personally irritating to see the same people doing the exact same menial thing and succeeding.

So, please nerf DRK and/or AST.
DRK's Salted Earth pull has always been problematic,
and AST's Macrocosmos has too big of an area of effect to be that good at dealing damage on top of the compiled damage returning as a heal in Microcosmos.

The '50% damage decrease after one target' can be added to AST, even just for frontline. Maybe even the same for DRG's limit break as it has been used to similar effect in the past, though in recent times it has been unfavorable compared to AST.

I know adding changes to frontlines exclusively may be seen as a slippery slope, but these would be a few the community could handle. There's already a flat damage reduction for most classes. And it wouldn't change how the abilities fundamentally function and cause confusion.

In conclusion, this method of running in to kill half the enemy team with a single button press is not conducive to a fun experience in frontlines. A reward as great as that should not be so simple to execute, especially coming from three healers.

An AST dies in like 2 hits. Just guard when you see a DRK jump in. Don't waste your guard at pointless times; or wait for it to come back up before you engage a large zerg. Have map awareness so you don't get caught unaware. Keep your map open. Easy day.

[Scintilla]

An AST dies in like 2 hits. Just guard when you see a DRK jump in. Don't waste your guard at pointless times; or wait for it to come back up before you engage a large zerg. Have map awareness so you don't get caught unaware. Keep your map open. Easy day.

As people have already said: Guard can be removed.

'Just use Guard' is not the magic solution that so many appear to see it as.

I haven't personally seen many DRK, AST, AST, AST teams, so I wouldn't want to say too much about those team setups specifically. But premades definitely are an issue.

In a classic DRK-DRG premade, Guard can help, but it's not a perfect solution. You have to be prepared and more aware of your surroundings to ensure you use it quickly enough. A slight delay will leave you still taking some damage after casting, and a single unlucky stun can be the difference between getting it cast in time or not. Not only this, but a notable proportion of your team will be infrequent players who may not be so aware of what's happening and will be too late or even overlook Guard entirely.
These premades are bad enough to vs and all you can really hope is that with warnings/marks, your team can weather the attacks well enough. This isn't often the case, so premades are regularly left with a significant advantage even in this workable setup.

The most troublesome setup I have seen so far has probably been DRK, RPR, DRG, DRG.
DRK vokes, RPR removes Guard, DRGs LB = a mass of dead alliance members, regardless of whether they used Guard or not. The only sure way of avoiding is to keep far away from your group to avoid the voke entirely - and even this isn't possible in all maps, particularly the centre podium of Onsal or the many bottlenecks of Shatter.

Reaper having such a short LB cooldown means a guaranteed Guard removal every single time. And RPRs teleport allows it to get into and out of position extremely quickly, making it almost impossible to stop before it gets chance to LB.

Seeing premades with consistent 350k+ damage, 40+ kills, and 80+ assists and a 90% win rate, shows just what an advantage they have. An advantage which quickly leads to defeatist attitudes amongst some within opposing teams which just exacerbates the issue.

[Mawlzy]

Seeing premades with consistent 350k+ damage, 40+ kills, and 80+ assists and a 90% win rate, shows just what an advantage they have. An advantage which quickly leads to defeatist attitudes amongst some within opposing teams which just exacerbates the issue.

Exactly this. Irrespective of balance and meta comps, the ability to synchronize LBs perfectly through voice simply gives such premades an advantage that is poisoning the mode. I would also hope that, rather than playing whack-a-mole, members of such premades would prefer a fair challenge and pit their evident skills against other premades.