Frontlines sucks Ultra megathread

[Praesul]

EW FL is probably my least liked iteration of pvp in the entire history of the game. While I think the new pvp kits are great, LBs completely ruined FL's balance. Because of how strong aoe damage and cc are they had to jack up the passive defense every role gets and it takes forever to kill anything outside of LB windows, and most jobs get their LBs constantly so it just becomes a game of abusing LBs.

It's not as huge of an issue in RW because the player count is smaller, and obviously the kits were designed for CC where they make way morse sense (5v5 and no job stacking). EW's pvp changes resulted in me playing the least amount of FL ever, I'd only ever queue up if friends wanted to do the daily or I wanted to farm mogtomes.

[Valence]

You're aware that the current DRK meta doesn't even derive from LBs right? Those aren't helping, but Salted Earth is not a LB, and it can still be used in conjunction with many non LB AoE moves and trash everything caught in it if people don't guard, get caught off guard, etc. Happens quite a lot in the opening fights when nobody has LB yet.

[Praesul]

Not the issue. Even if Salted Earth didn't exist matches would still become LB clown fiestas due to LB uptime, and it forces the devs to jack up the passive damage reduction on all roles which in turn makes smaller engagements or 1v1 snoozefests. It heavily incentivizes just AoEing and lawmowering teams, which was not as prevalent in previous iterations of FL. Even back when people would stack caster LBs the cooldown on them was much higher, and aoe damage outside of a select few jobs wasn't that strong.

The pvp kits were not designed with FL in mind at all and it shows.

[Sinstrel]

The pvp kits were not designed with FL in mind at all and it shows.

I would bot be surprised in the least if there were either massive changes to Frontlines, or an entirely new game mode in the works which the kits were actually designed for.

They just may not have had time to implement such massive changes in Endwalker and instead planned it for Dawntrail/future expansions, and are just making working patches to Frontline in the interim. I have almost always been an optimist, though. To be honest I'd be extremely disappointed if Yoshi and team still persisted on this large scale army/lawnmower gameplay considering all of the negative feedback across the board on every data center, every language and every culture.

[Archeron]

I'm not optimistic, even less so with the Dev team. Lets not make excuses for them. They had almost 2 years, and they made sub-par changes to Frontlines, and Rivalwings continues to be neglected.

So since 6.1, we've had more content removed from Frontlines, than they added. Borderland ruins, gone. Old Shatter, Gone. New shatter is only loved by premades. Frontlines had a LOT of issues, that went unaddressed for over 6 months at a time. Some of the changes/adjustments weren't even made because of Frontline specific issues. Some of them were just blanket changes from CC adjustments. Just look at how long it took for melee damage reduction to come into play. It's inexcusable. They obviously poured all of their resources into Crystal Conflict for the vast majority of that expansion, willingly neglecting issues in Frontlines.

I don't doubt they're busy, but the information we have about potential changes is so vague, and beyond additional abilities being added to the game, the "Adjustments to existing maps" (The way I interpret this, we can clearly consider new maps completely off the table.) This may not even be referring to frontlines, but certain maps on CC that have had known issues for quite some time. I suspect they will double down on CC yet again in Dawntrail, until we have more concrete information on just what changes are coming. I would not be surprised given their workload if the alleged 7.1 pvp update is as major as we expect, gets delayed, or split up into smaller patches.

[Taliriah]

I'm not optimistic, even less so with the Dev team.

Yep, one thing that's abundantly clear is that CBU3 is extremely conservative about changing anything about the game's formula. Perhaps they are like this as a result of the disaster that FFXIV 1.0 was compared to FFXI.

[Rin_onishi]

I'd rather they just go back to 8v8v8 and limit premades to two players. maybe just go to two teams of 25v25 with simpler map designs.

Please god, ever since I first played it back in early shadowbringers I've hated the sheer amount of players. It's simply way too many. Two alliances per gc would help this alot imo but 8v8v8 would also be good.
It's also an issue for me cause I still play on ps4(slim) and it struggles to load in everything happening at once from 50+ people in one area, making those not rendered completely invisible to me and delaying animations/buff/debuffs meaning my limit break animations will happen like 5 seconds after I actually use them. No it's not an internet thing cause this was not an issue when i was still playing on my gaming laptop(hardware issue in case you're wondering why ps4)

[Rin_onishi]

Please god, ever since I first played it back in early shadowbringers I've hated the sheer amount of players. It's simply way too many. Two alliances per gc would help this alot imo but 8v8v8 would also be good.
It's also an issue for me cause I still play on ps4(slim) and it struggles to load in everything happening at once from 50+ people in one area, making those not rendered completely invisible to me and delaying animations/buff/debuffs meaning my limit break animations will happen like 5 seconds after I actually use them. No it's not an internet thing cause this was not an issue when i was still playing on my gaming laptop(hardware issue in case you're wondering why ps4)

Laptop was Lenovo legion 4 in case specs are for some reason needed for comparison

[Mawlzy]

The changes to the blacklist feature now mean that chat gets flooded by the awful spam of players I've blacklisted, just with "Unknown 01 (Sargatanas)" instead of their name, as a random example. This is incredibly annoying, particularly given it makes noises. Is there any fix for this? Other than "commanders" learning that spamming chat is completely rude and counter-productive?

[Vandi]

I missed those days dearly where 24 man frontlines existed. These days, I feel like I have no control which is why I've stopped playing frontlines altogether. No more forcing fights playing blue dps since you can stack stun on top of stun with no consequences. No more going off on your own and playing 1v2/3s since everyone has access to that elixir. I'm forced to rely on the team at all times. If the squad decides to avoid all fights, place 2nd, and be happy with that playstyle I'm forced to accept it. My only 2 options these days are to enjoy what currently exist or to not pvp at all. For some reason certain maps and modes keep getting locked or deleted altogether. I would probably go through with current frontlines if 24 man still existed. Right now's it's not worth. I'm not sure how many enjoys this current version of frontlines. Regardless, I'm glad that many, if not majority, are enjoying it. I can't seem to follow or forced myself to unfortunately. Even with the new players bring me in every now and then it's very difficult to enjoy it. It feels as though frontlines is being changed in a way that there's only one way to play. I don't want to play frontlines playing pve only or only zerging over high value objectives. It's a boring, overused playstyle.

I've played hardcore exclusively for pvp for 4 years. Despite me disagreeing with more than half of the changes made over the course of that time period I still played to enjoy myself. I don't feel like wanting to try hard for a win with only 6 buttons available for use. It's too much work.

Absolutely agree with everything here.^ All pvp is now is a massive kiddy pool free for all. Instead of simply bringing back 8-man matches and just banning premades which was what caused us to lose it in the first place, the devs have just let it go to hell.

I would greatly suggest Crystal Conflict for those seeking a change.