With this thread I would like to get the opinion of others regarding how FL plays now compared to how it did prior to 7.1, as well as provide some feedback.
The general feeling is negative for multiple reasons. I understand the will to shake things up and make things fresh again but I don't think people were complaining about job balancing before, so why even change some of them so drastically and turn them into shell of themselves or clunky messes?
Let's consider the main issue people had regarding FL; the DRK meta. While salted earth should have never been considered an issue in itself (rather, it promoted team play), a lot of things revolving around it made it very dominating in Frontlines and should have been adressed before. The issue had multiple solutions that could have worked on their own; nerf the radius of salted earth, cap the number of targets it could pull, remove guardbreak mechanics, implement diminishing returns so you wouldn't get pulled multiple times, give dashes to some classes who struggled with mobility so they could escape... You had 2 years to adress all this, and 4 months of preseason, but instead you implemented the current mess at the start of a new CC season?
If I had to give my own opinion, the biggest issue in FL was the scaling of MCH limit break with battle high (the HP pool of some ranged being nearly equal to the full damage of their LB alone with BH5), the absence of diminishing returns + purify not nullifying KB and pull, and the Guardbreak LBs (It's not good pvp to be rendered unable to do anything, in FL or CC), and instant death LBs (SAM/NIN).
I'm not going to comment further on this because it's barely an issue anymore but I wanted to insist on the fact that aside from the DRK meta, most people were happy with Frontlines and could have fun in it.
While some things could have simply been fixed, some skills revamped, some added as follow ups to already existing ones, a lot of jobs now have a very different gameplay that really doesn't feel good in FL, both because of the new hit detection system and the new skills. The overabundance of crowd control has become absurd, and despite this increase the duration of purify has been reduced…
The pace is also rather different now, and while I would very much like to try the current FL with the previous hit detection, I feel like the damage we deal would still be underwhelming because of the HP and defense increases. There really is no satisfaction dealing sub 10k damage with most skills (without BH).
This is a point that should also be taken into consideration when adjusting jobs; a lot of the most enthusiastic FL players play to challenge themselves to either do a very high amount of damage or rack a maximum of kills. When you nerf the individual impact of players, you create a very casual pvp audience and NA data centers certainly don't need more people who are "only here for their quick xp regardless of the outcome of the match".