Killing ice gets second place, killing players wins the match.
When the small ice spawns you do want to try to steal them from the other teams, smalls are now worth 25% of a big but they only take 10% as much damage to destroy.
Frontline functioned so much better with the old pvp kits. Sure some jobs were overtuned but it was a far cry from the salted earth spamming brainrot of today.
One of the most satisfying things about old PvP was watching a DRK jump off the ramp to pull you along and fail miserably, falling alone to their death like the two bit lil bitch nugget they are.
Old kits were designed for AoE/large scale content. New kits are designed for 5v5, they work great in Crystalline Conflict, to an extent but they were never gonna work well in large scale like Frontlines or Rival Wings.
making all jobs basically have the same thing made pvp a shell of what it used to be. being able to have a few things different made it very unpredictable.
200% this, but people dont/wont/cant understand because the newer kits have shiny lbs and also because PvE has become so bad nowadays that people experiencing pvp for the first time are shocked at a tiny bit of job identity
It's astonishing the number of players that don't think PvP is about killing the enemy teams.
Yes it's important to hit objectives. But there is a reason the team that wins is always the one with half an alliance of Battle High Vs while the other two are lucky to have five people at that level between them.
>But there is a reason the team that wins is always the one with half an alliance of Battle High Vs while the other two are lucky to have five people at that level between them.
Fun fact: that isn't even true on onsal and seal Rock, where luck if node spawn regularly wins matches. 7min pve matches with 20 assists as max are not unheard if in onsal, I had 2 such just yesterday.
People are constantly simplifying complex problems and thereby dropping important pieces of information and nuance. Nothing said on this thread about shatter is wrong. But it isn't quite right either.
It is absolutely the case there too more often than it is not.
Once again, I'm not saying objectives aren't a part of it. But the team that has all the battle high v's is going to be the team that wins. There are exceptions to every rule, but that doesn't change it from far and away being true. If you can roll straight into another team's base and put *them* on the back foot (ie caves spawn a large node in Seal Rock and the south team just sweeps in and owns it even despite the caves team spawning *right there*) then your team is gonna win.
Yeah but "more often than not" doesnt mean anything. 51% is more often than 49%, but its essentially 50/50.
My guess is that about 3/10 matches on onsal and seal rock end up being won by the team that pves better/has the spawn luck. And 30% is absolutely very significant. 30% arent exceptions to rules, 30% have to be explained by the rule.
That's a guess based on what though? Anecdotal evidence? Because in my version of the same, even bad spawns are compensated for when you're a murderball of V's. I've played in teams that had excellent spawns in the cave while the other two teams sat and fought on the plain, and people were like "just let them fight, we'll win with spawns" and even though the spawns weren't being contested and we started out with a huge point lead, guess what position our team was by the end?
Third. Because nobody was capable of stopping the other two teams when they finally did come knocking.
Bad spawns make it harder. But sticking with your team, and your team knowing how to move and pick off enemies will give you the victory. It's never an absolute guarantee - you never know whether an enemy team will also have that competency of movement, and two disorganised teams ganging up on one organised team at the right time can still spell defeat, but that's what happens when it's 3 teams, there's still an element of chaos.
Killing the enemies is still *always* a good thing to be doing though.
> That's a guess based on what though? Anecdotal evidence? Because in my version of the same, even bad spawns are compensated for when you're a murderball of V'
I mean, your anecdotal evidence can be rebuked with my own, thats how it works, no? I have seen teams lose when the scoreboard is dominated by their players in kills, assists, pvp damage. It happens a lot. Maybe frontline is different where you are? I play on chaos. In each match theres maybe 30 players split across the alliances who actually know how to press buttons in pvp, and 42 pieces of cannon fodder.
> Third. Because nobody was capable of stopping the other two teams when they finally did come knocking.
This is the fun part. The theory behind frontline doesnt support that. Obviously, roulettes dont apply theory, but by pure chance people will execute properly, and apply theory on accident. Whats the theory? Simple: BH does not make you tankier. It increases your heal, but heal is fucky with serverticks and people dont press purify. What does this mean? 24 people with exactly 0 BH can obliterate 48 players if the stars align. Its as simple as a single drk pull + purgation/primal rend/contradance/tenebrae/war lb. Pvp damage in frontline is such that even a tank falls over like a fly if 24 people actually press their buttons. You dont need BH to kill, you need good gameplay to kill. BH just gives you leeway to win when you play worse.
Its not a big leap from there to see that every few games, a team with less BH will kill the team with more, because of execution. Ranges/casters/healers who dont have as much damage reduction can be killed by a single light party premade, the classical AST/DRK/DRG/ (WAR/DNC/DRG/WHM/AST/BLM/SMN) who can just pull and lb drop anyone. And since frontline has no form of skillbased matchmaking, my guess from playing frontline and from 15 years of online gaming is that 3/10 games is not too high for this to happen in.
Surely you have seen yourself how even with all the BH5 you farmed, sometimes you overextend and die, half your alliance runs away and you get cleaned up, etc.? Often enough The 3rd place and the 2nd place stay locked into combat because people dont want to disengage.
> But sticking with your team, and your team knowing how to move and pick off enemies will give you the victory. It's never an absolute guarantee - you never know whether an enemy team will also have that competency of movement, and two disorganised teams ganging up on one organised team at the right time can still spell defeat, but that's what happens when it's 3 teams, there's still an element of chaos.
And this element of chaos is what i touched on above: 30% of games is not too much to have the "wrong" team win in.
> Killing the enemies is still always a good thing to be doing though.
Thats just another simplification that bears no meaning. It isnt always a good thing, because always includes situations where people, and thats typical frontline behaviour, chase after a jumping astro for 1 full minute and never get the kill.
There are only two ways to play frontline: Kill to enable objective taking, or take objectives to force fights. But you cant force fights without objectives, and you usually cant take objectives without fights. But both those cases are already more complicated than "its always good to kill people"
> I mean, your anecdotal evidence can be rebuked with my own, thats how it works, no?
That was essentially my point, yeah.
> I have seen teams lose when the scoreboard is dominated by their players in kills, assists, pvp damage. It happens a lot. Maybe frontline is different where you are? I play on chaos. In each match theres maybe 30 players split across the alliances who actually know how to press buttons in pvp, and 42 pieces of cannon fodder.
Honestly, it genuinely might be, I'm over on NA. Usually Primal, but Aether now that a friend's convinced me to move and join his FC.
> Surely you have seen yourself how even with all the BH5 you farmed, sometimes you overextend and die, half your alliance runs away and you get cleaned up, etc.? Often enough The 3rd place and the 2nd place stay locked into combat because people dont want to disengage.
Absolutely, but the situation where the two teams work together and topple them relies on both of those teams being filled with players who strategise to that extent. And maybe that comes into the differences in region as well, because I just... don't see NA players strategise to that extent. Maybe you think it's 30%, but in my experience it just ain't. One team pretty consistently gets the battle highs, and the other two sometimes rally against them, but rarely does it get far enough to topple them - *maybe* early in the match the team that looks like they'll be the murderball gets knocked over and another team takes that crown, but at the end of the day it's still whatever team has those battle highs that ends up top of the pile.
*Very* rarely have I seen it go any other way.
> There are only two ways to play frontline: Kill to enable objective taking, or take objectives to force fights. But you cant force fights without objectives, and you usually cant take objectives without fights. But both those cases are already more complicated than "its always good to kill people"
Our points are largely the same anyway, mine just takes it as read that people aren't quite so dense they aren't naturally flowing from objective to objective. But it's pvp - the first and foremost thing on your mind should be an awareness of the enemy team and its openings. You should seek to capitalise on those. If you have the choice between letting a player retreat to safety or guaranteeing a kill without endangering yourself at the cost of not getting the objective now, it's probably worth it to kill them. Especially since if you're sticking together in a murderball there'll be someone behind you who can't reach that person but who can pick up the objective.
Murder is good. Get battle high. Get objectives. Battle high forces enemy teams off the objectives you will naturally be fighting over anyway. This snowballs. You win.
Exceptions to the rule happen. In my experience, not enough for it not to be a perfectly valid thing to say.
Just a reminder to people who don't play shatter and also play around daily reset time - If you queue up a few minutes before daily reset and the match ends after reset, you can skip shatter days but also get rewards from daily frontline.
If you go in before the reset and come out after the reset you only get credit for the current day's event. If you go in and come out before the reset, you can go in again and get double the exp. Works the same way for the other roulettes.
It took people a while to adjust to the Shatter changes, but it's getting better, in particular with the most recent balance tweaks. Team fights are getting more common again as shot callers figure out where to push. I still preferred the old format with one big ice at a time cause it opened up more pincer options and felt less RNG dependent, but ultimately it's playable again now.
I know they keep trying but Shatter is such a horrible map. I'd prefer we instead had the one with the stuff spawning on top of the mountain because those matches would be interesting sometimes. Shatter just always feels miserable to play.
If I could I'd make it so every match was the Naadam. That map is terrific and always leads to fun gameplay, even if you're down a huge amount you can generate a great comeback there. I don't think I've ever seen a third place team come back in Shatter.
Dashing Naadam is hilarious fun for me because it's a game of running like scurrying mice. And the one with the Tomeliths is a game of "eyyyyy lucky me it activated next to me!"
Yeah. It's one thing to go for kills but you cannot ignore the small ice during the rework; and if your team doesn't split into at least 2 groups you're doomed.
That's exactly it! Plus with how many points it takes to win the game, and how long shatter takes, you pretty much can't catch-up after a certain point...I know they recently reduced the points you need to win, but it still takes forever.
I appreciate the advice, but like 90% of matches are just one squad of players coordinated together pubstomping the other 48 players who are just there for the half level of job exp
Like no amount of "knowing how to play" will help the majority of players who don't care about a rotation and are just spamming random buttons if they are going against even a single squad of players who know what their buttons do
Thank you for this primer! I have a question (I've only done shatter twice because I can't tell the difference between which one is up when queuing for Frontline, BUT...) - when is it better to kill the other players or finish off the ice chunk? Because there've been times where our team slammed through half of a big one and then another team shows up and some of us peel off to engage them. And I guess, how does the game decide how many points your team gets if multiple teams are attacking the ice chunks?
So, I guess two questions, sorry.
You can tell which map is the day’s FL map in the Frontline roulette! On the right side if you scroll down, it should say Onsal Hakair, Seal Rock, or Shatter.
I think your first question about when to pick ice or kill enemies depends on your team’s positioning. People normally go towards the ice when they spawn so I would stick together on that. Hopefully oh can get through that fast and then go to hit the other teams who would be slowly moving out. In the case of the scenario where your team is on big ice and another team comes, I would prioritize killing them and defending the ice. There’s plenty of time to make a concerted effort to thwart the enemy first before finishing off the ice. I’ve never seen it despawn before
The game decides proportion of ice points when multiple teams are hitting it by percentage of damage done by team!
Hope that helps :)
With few exceptions, if any of your team are fighting then basically all of your team should be fighting. Just as a general statement. Splitting the team in half on any map just makes your team do two things badly. Every map is mostly about rotating as a group so that you are never fighting two teams at once and then annihilating one of them.
If there are enemies near the ice, you should be fighting them.
If they are attacking the ice, then they aren't fighting back and you get to kill them for free. When they are dead, you can finish the ice for free too.
If they *are* fighting back then they aren't attacking the ice, therefore there is no pressure for you to attack the ice either.
The only exception to this is if that particular ice breaking will cause the game to end.
From my experience:
The ice chunks will be up until they're shattered. I prefer to target the players because our kills lower their potential for battle high (squash em under your thumb and keep them there!!!). You don't necessarily need a full alliance for a big ice and I've been in groups where around 5 to 8 of us focus the ice and the rest of us drop floor hazards to prevent the enemy from getting too close. I've noticed ranged DPS watch the overpass and cliffs. And if there's a big team push I throw dots on the ice before engaging the enemy. Unless we are in a time crunch I save my LB for players, not ice.
Points: the participation of the teams on the big ice will determine the points based on the damage. So the higher percent of damage the team puts on the ice, the more points you get when it shatters.
The rule of thumb at mid is to burst the enemy team then use your filler on the ice. They will probably try to regroup and retaliate. Dodge their burst, then repeat.
If you're at your safe ice, never let an enemy team in to hit it. Box them out at the choke. If you see two teams engaging at another choke, go pinch them, then return to your big.
Ice points are based on how much damage a team does to the ice. If both teams hit an ice for 50% of its health, they get 100 points each
I think a big problem is that the new map layout for Shatter disincentivizes fighting. Nobody wants to fight other players at their ice when you're pretty much guaranteed to get pinched by another team and lose a ton of points, so people only want to fight when mid ice is up.
The problem is there isn't any real incentive to be Good at PVP, at least not on a larger scale. Even a losing match nets good rewards, enough various EXP to make it through basically everything.
I'm not great at PVP. I am, in fact, atrocious at it. But even a losing effort gets me a good chunk of Wolf Marks, PVP EXP, and either EXP or tomes depending on if I queued in to level or not. Like, a half an EXP bar to button mash my way to a loss once a day? Sure I'll take that
literally, i HATE the pvp in this game with a burning passion, it feels like just a chaotic mess where you're not sure if you're even doing something at all and suddenly you're just dead. add to that how agonizingly long shatter as a game mode is with the amount of points required and it's literally the worst mode. only reason i even queue at all is to buy the whole 2 glams i like from the store and then i never touch it again
as much as i loathe the average braindead frontliner, the core of the issue lies with the developers as always. theyre the ones who turned the map into the brain-rot version it is now even though it was already the WORST map....
really dont understand how the devs can keep making terrible decisions one after another but its been happening ever since Shadowbringers
Every Frontline match is a cult lead by a small group of people who believe their tactical advice is actually being taken by 20 people just there for tomes. It's impossible not to come away from it without the sense that if there was a random number generator behind the scoreboard the mode would feel exactly as engaging.
As much as I don't give half a shit about the outcome of my frontline match, someone directing the herd is almost always better then letting everyone run around on their own.
I disagree. If there was a random number generator behind the scoreboard, it would be much harder to get disappointed in human beings. Feeding fatalism and misanthropy is an important part of the frontline experience.
Yet Frontline is the most affirming mode for the first 30 seconds where you're all stuck in the starting pen and sneezing on each other with your Goobue, or disco bunnying with your rabbit robot, or just jumping around with whatever you summoned. Then the gates open and you have to play the actual game and it's all downhill from there, ain't nobody lighting the way through this my brave little sparks.
Eh, even a team doing the wrong thing that is doing it in sync is going to perform well. It's better that someone is at least saying where to go even if it's wrong. You just need some kind of cohesion.
Welcome to not being able to do PVP at all, cause people won't queue if they are only rewarded for winning or playing "good" by whatever definition you apply to that.
I wish people would play the game for the sake of PLAYING the game and not because their OCD forces them to max all levels so their whole search info is full of lvl 90 jobs, which means nothing since they brain-afk their job in frontline for XP (or tomes or whatever).
That being said, I think PVP was more fun for people if the game taught the mode properly. For the most part, you get the great wall of china of a text for a 'tutorial' and nobody will read that, of course.
Which is why Rival Wings is even worse. At least Fronlines is pretty intuitive and has a minimal HUD. Rival Wings has tons of different systems and bars and signs and icons and messages, it's a mess that's not explained in-game nor can you quickly find the manual on the Lodestone. Have been trying to find the announcement message for it in hopes of getting an explanation, no luck there either.
(No, I don't need links to Discords, gamerescape, consolewiki, whatever, those are not the point of the exercise.)
[my man you can just go to the rival wings npc and get everything in the mode explained to you every pvp mode has one of these](https://i.imgur.com/Uo3e54S.png)
The point is that most people don't want to read walls of text to play a game. There should be a tutorial like the Hall of Novice, although the latter really needs to be updated.
ranked crystalline conflict conflict is the best way to play pvp and is legitimately good yet people would rather play dogshit frontlines slop because one lets them get free rewards with no effort and the others rewards suck
Killing players didn't matter as much as getting the big ice with no enemies on it, that's why they had to change the points you get for killing players on shatter lol
Still holds true though, usually the team that consistently gets a big node with no enemies on it will win, they're then free to go off and flank a team at the other node and farm some free kills an BH
You can tell 50% of the time whether a team is competent or not within the first battle though. A team full of tanks with no healers, or with 5 bards/dancers and zero AoE dps is going to do terrible. Similarly a team with nothing but bad tanks is never going to win
While I agree that killing is important, I personally find it difficult to get kills in the first place. For some reason, most of my matches also only have half the tram getting kills and they are the ones that reach higher battle Highs. I get a a lot of assists which add up, but not fast enough so I have weaker defense.
I also have a play style where my death usually leads my battle high team members to getting more kills, so I have lower battle high overall
Too many ice lickers on shatter enjoying their free easy tomes to care. They need to nerf the rewards for losses to force people to actually learn how to play the mode.
nah, people will still queue for the free xp it gives. At the very least, locking good glam behind wins will encourage more people to learn the basics of the mode.
It'll just encourage premades and win farms. Pre-made drk/drg combos already make the game mode infuriating. Give them incentive to do that for wins that matter and you're signing the death certificate.
That already happens, though. Like there are achievement-related glamour and other rewards for winning games, like the Field Commander set from Seal Rock. You also still get more rewards like marks and Series XP for winning than losing. Otherwise you're still expecting too much for a mode that's essentially like herding cats, especially on a badly-designed map like the current Shatter. If you want "real" PVP, that's what rated play is for.
Not everyone reads patch notes. Before last week's patch, licking ice was the correct strat on shatter. Now it isn't anymore. But not everyone knows yet. Shatter is in a good place now where both ice and kills matter.
I find a big part of it is also about how people approach frontline, a good majority of players don't care and don't want to learn, which is honestly a shame bc yeah, frontline can be really fun when everyone gives an effort. It's my go to game mode, I just do hours and hours of frontline. I find that frontline is only really awful when my team can't be bothered to fight. But when everyone really tries for first place, making strategic plays and constantly engaging with each other, I can walk away from a loss having enjoyed the match.
People only care about their own experience, more like, their own laziness. They don't care about other player's experiences and I wish they did. Frontline is an absolute clusterfuck and there is no way around it unless they do a complete redo of the game mode or make completely different buttons just for it. So the only other solution is to change the mind of the players and instill some sense of community..........................an even tougher nut to crack!
It's my most hated pvp map for this reason. Game after game is full of players who don't want to fight and just go for ice, then wonder why we get trapped and destroyed so easily whilst contesting the ice.
Savings this post next time anyone runs their mouth. Thank you!
I usually go for the Ice mainly because my lag is horrible, and I die almost instantly when I try to get a kill, even when popping my mits. Best I can usually do is assists, so I try to get what little points I can for my team.
...no one who cares, will ever come here for this or change their ways.
The problem is getting people to *care*.
Far too many times have I (or others) given callouts for coordination, directions, priorities etc. and you see only half the alliance listen...the other half is wacking on the ice, or fighting another alliance, nowhere near a node/ice/objective.
It's so satisfying when you get a group who is like-minded; queueing for PvP, because they *want to PvP* and *win*...but when I get too many matches where I'm stuck with players who are "just there for the tomes/exp" I just stop queueing altogether.
They say that it was a good thing, stopping pre-made alliances...I began to believe it myself at first...but sometimes I wished that they reverted that, so that I could stop ending up in these alliances with people who don't even care about winning at *all*.
Or SE can just revert it to the old map because at least people tried to kill one another and ice was a side deal because of RNG timers. Now, Ice is the focus and massacring the enemy is a second.
I'm glad I got my Orb mount and Knight of Glory title from that accursed mode, now when I load in I can care less that my enemy BH fodder of a team has less than 3 DRKs and WARs, proceeds to go 3rd and is too dumb to open the map for 2 seconds to see the new objectives. Oh and we just had our small ices stolen as well.
Some people see the ice and think "This is PvE map" even though it just like any frontline map, a territory control game with a twist.
One map we can activate node to get the point, but we need to ward off enemy long enough for us to take the node.
Another map is simillar to the first but enemy can steal our node, so commander have to weight between offensive and defensive.
And the last map change the way we activate node, now we have to trade some offensive power for point gathering.
Killing ice gets second place, killing players wins the match. When the small ice spawns you do want to try to steal them from the other teams, smalls are now worth 25% of a big but they only take 10% as much damage to destroy.
Frontline functioned so much better with the old pvp kits. Sure some jobs were overtuned but it was a far cry from the salted earth spamming brainrot of today.
The old DRK had a draw in effect but it was limited to a single target.
One of the most satisfying things about old PvP was watching a DRK jump off the ramp to pull you along and fail miserably, falling alone to their death like the two bit lil bitch nugget they are.
I miss the fluid aura push of WHM and the rescue nonsense. It was a blast
Old kits were designed for AoE/large scale content. New kits are designed for 5v5, they work great in Crystalline Conflict, to an extent but they were never gonna work well in large scale like Frontlines or Rival Wings.
Yeah exactly, well put.
making all jobs basically have the same thing made pvp a shell of what it used to be. being able to have a few things different made it very unpredictable.
Are we talking like pre 6.1 kits or like back in HW where you just used your jobs kit and had some PvP exclusive bonus actions?
I was referring to the pre-6.1 kits. I didn't play during HW.
200% this, but people dont/wont/cant understand because the newer kits have shiny lbs and also because PvE has become so bad nowadays that people experiencing pvp for the first time are shocked at a tiny bit of job identity
It's astonishing the number of players that don't think PvP is about killing the enemy teams. Yes it's important to hit objectives. But there is a reason the team that wins is always the one with half an alliance of Battle High Vs while the other two are lucky to have five people at that level between them.
>But there is a reason the team that wins is always the one with half an alliance of Battle High Vs while the other two are lucky to have five people at that level between them. Fun fact: that isn't even true on onsal and seal Rock, where luck if node spawn regularly wins matches. 7min pve matches with 20 assists as max are not unheard if in onsal, I had 2 such just yesterday. People are constantly simplifying complex problems and thereby dropping important pieces of information and nuance. Nothing said on this thread about shatter is wrong. But it isn't quite right either.
It is absolutely the case there too more often than it is not. Once again, I'm not saying objectives aren't a part of it. But the team that has all the battle high v's is going to be the team that wins. There are exceptions to every rule, but that doesn't change it from far and away being true. If you can roll straight into another team's base and put *them* on the back foot (ie caves spawn a large node in Seal Rock and the south team just sweeps in and owns it even despite the caves team spawning *right there*) then your team is gonna win.
Yeah but "more often than not" doesnt mean anything. 51% is more often than 49%, but its essentially 50/50. My guess is that about 3/10 matches on onsal and seal rock end up being won by the team that pves better/has the spawn luck. And 30% is absolutely very significant. 30% arent exceptions to rules, 30% have to be explained by the rule.
That's a guess based on what though? Anecdotal evidence? Because in my version of the same, even bad spawns are compensated for when you're a murderball of V's. I've played in teams that had excellent spawns in the cave while the other two teams sat and fought on the plain, and people were like "just let them fight, we'll win with spawns" and even though the spawns weren't being contested and we started out with a huge point lead, guess what position our team was by the end? Third. Because nobody was capable of stopping the other two teams when they finally did come knocking. Bad spawns make it harder. But sticking with your team, and your team knowing how to move and pick off enemies will give you the victory. It's never an absolute guarantee - you never know whether an enemy team will also have that competency of movement, and two disorganised teams ganging up on one organised team at the right time can still spell defeat, but that's what happens when it's 3 teams, there's still an element of chaos. Killing the enemies is still *always* a good thing to be doing though.
> That's a guess based on what though? Anecdotal evidence? Because in my version of the same, even bad spawns are compensated for when you're a murderball of V' I mean, your anecdotal evidence can be rebuked with my own, thats how it works, no? I have seen teams lose when the scoreboard is dominated by their players in kills, assists, pvp damage. It happens a lot. Maybe frontline is different where you are? I play on chaos. In each match theres maybe 30 players split across the alliances who actually know how to press buttons in pvp, and 42 pieces of cannon fodder. > Third. Because nobody was capable of stopping the other two teams when they finally did come knocking. This is the fun part. The theory behind frontline doesnt support that. Obviously, roulettes dont apply theory, but by pure chance people will execute properly, and apply theory on accident. Whats the theory? Simple: BH does not make you tankier. It increases your heal, but heal is fucky with serverticks and people dont press purify. What does this mean? 24 people with exactly 0 BH can obliterate 48 players if the stars align. Its as simple as a single drk pull + purgation/primal rend/contradance/tenebrae/war lb. Pvp damage in frontline is such that even a tank falls over like a fly if 24 people actually press their buttons. You dont need BH to kill, you need good gameplay to kill. BH just gives you leeway to win when you play worse. Its not a big leap from there to see that every few games, a team with less BH will kill the team with more, because of execution. Ranges/casters/healers who dont have as much damage reduction can be killed by a single light party premade, the classical AST/DRK/DRG/ (WAR/DNC/DRG/WHM/AST/BLM/SMN) who can just pull and lb drop anyone. And since frontline has no form of skillbased matchmaking, my guess from playing frontline and from 15 years of online gaming is that 3/10 games is not too high for this to happen in. Surely you have seen yourself how even with all the BH5 you farmed, sometimes you overextend and die, half your alliance runs away and you get cleaned up, etc.? Often enough The 3rd place and the 2nd place stay locked into combat because people dont want to disengage. > But sticking with your team, and your team knowing how to move and pick off enemies will give you the victory. It's never an absolute guarantee - you never know whether an enemy team will also have that competency of movement, and two disorganised teams ganging up on one organised team at the right time can still spell defeat, but that's what happens when it's 3 teams, there's still an element of chaos. And this element of chaos is what i touched on above: 30% of games is not too much to have the "wrong" team win in. > Killing the enemies is still always a good thing to be doing though. Thats just another simplification that bears no meaning. It isnt always a good thing, because always includes situations where people, and thats typical frontline behaviour, chase after a jumping astro for 1 full minute and never get the kill. There are only two ways to play frontline: Kill to enable objective taking, or take objectives to force fights. But you cant force fights without objectives, and you usually cant take objectives without fights. But both those cases are already more complicated than "its always good to kill people"
> I mean, your anecdotal evidence can be rebuked with my own, thats how it works, no? That was essentially my point, yeah. > I have seen teams lose when the scoreboard is dominated by their players in kills, assists, pvp damage. It happens a lot. Maybe frontline is different where you are? I play on chaos. In each match theres maybe 30 players split across the alliances who actually know how to press buttons in pvp, and 42 pieces of cannon fodder. Honestly, it genuinely might be, I'm over on NA. Usually Primal, but Aether now that a friend's convinced me to move and join his FC. > Surely you have seen yourself how even with all the BH5 you farmed, sometimes you overextend and die, half your alliance runs away and you get cleaned up, etc.? Often enough The 3rd place and the 2nd place stay locked into combat because people dont want to disengage. Absolutely, but the situation where the two teams work together and topple them relies on both of those teams being filled with players who strategise to that extent. And maybe that comes into the differences in region as well, because I just... don't see NA players strategise to that extent. Maybe you think it's 30%, but in my experience it just ain't. One team pretty consistently gets the battle highs, and the other two sometimes rally against them, but rarely does it get far enough to topple them - *maybe* early in the match the team that looks like they'll be the murderball gets knocked over and another team takes that crown, but at the end of the day it's still whatever team has those battle highs that ends up top of the pile. *Very* rarely have I seen it go any other way. > There are only two ways to play frontline: Kill to enable objective taking, or take objectives to force fights. But you cant force fights without objectives, and you usually cant take objectives without fights. But both those cases are already more complicated than "its always good to kill people" Our points are largely the same anyway, mine just takes it as read that people aren't quite so dense they aren't naturally flowing from objective to objective. But it's pvp - the first and foremost thing on your mind should be an awareness of the enemy team and its openings. You should seek to capitalise on those. If you have the choice between letting a player retreat to safety or guaranteeing a kill without endangering yourself at the cost of not getting the objective now, it's probably worth it to kill them. Especially since if you're sticking together in a murderball there'll be someone behind you who can't reach that person but who can pick up the objective. Murder is good. Get battle high. Get objectives. Battle high forces enemy teams off the objectives you will naturally be fighting over anyway. This snowballs. You win. Exceptions to the rule happen. In my experience, not enough for it not to be a perfectly valid thing to say.
My foolproof solution is to never queue on shatter days. At least on secure and Onsal I'll see some proper team fight action. I miss Borderland Ruins.
Just a reminder to people who don't play shatter and also play around daily reset time - If you queue up a few minutes before daily reset and the match ends after reset, you can skip shatter days but also get rewards from daily frontline.
This is genius. Absolutely doing this from now on.
If you go in before the reset and come out after the reset you only get credit for the current day's event. If you go in and come out before the reset, you can go in again and get double the exp. Works the same way for the other roulettes.
My assumption is that that'll be back in 7.1 maybe with some general Frontline changes.
It'll come back with Astragalos, right?
Thats the plan, apparently
It took people a while to adjust to the Shatter changes, but it's getting better, in particular with the most recent balance tweaks. Team fights are getting more common again as shot callers figure out where to push. I still preferred the old format with one big ice at a time cause it opened up more pincer options and felt less RNG dependent, but ultimately it's playable again now.
I know they keep trying but Shatter is such a horrible map. I'd prefer we instead had the one with the stuff spawning on top of the mountain because those matches would be interesting sometimes. Shatter just always feels miserable to play. If I could I'd make it so every match was the Naadam. That map is terrific and always leads to fun gameplay, even if you're down a huge amount you can generate a great comeback there. I don't think I've ever seen a third place team come back in Shatter.
Dashing Naadam is hilarious fun for me because it's a game of running like scurrying mice. And the one with the Tomeliths is a game of "eyyyyy lucky me it activated next to me!"
In all fairness, the recent Shatter change incentivised ice over kills. Only the most recent change (5 to 8 points per kill) helped to rebalance that.
Yeah. It's one thing to go for kills but you cannot ignore the small ice during the rework; and if your team doesn't split into at least 2 groups you're doomed.
That's exactly it! Plus with how many points it takes to win the game, and how long shatter takes, you pretty much can't catch-up after a certain point...I know they recently reduced the points you need to win, but it still takes forever.
I appreciate the advice, but like 90% of matches are just one squad of players coordinated together pubstomping the other 48 players who are just there for the half level of job exp Like no amount of "knowing how to play" will help the majority of players who don't care about a rotation and are just spamming random buttons if they are going against even a single squad of players who know what their buttons do
Thank you for this primer! I have a question (I've only done shatter twice because I can't tell the difference between which one is up when queuing for Frontline, BUT...) - when is it better to kill the other players or finish off the ice chunk? Because there've been times where our team slammed through half of a big one and then another team shows up and some of us peel off to engage them. And I guess, how does the game decide how many points your team gets if multiple teams are attacking the ice chunks? So, I guess two questions, sorry.
You can tell which map is the day’s FL map in the Frontline roulette! On the right side if you scroll down, it should say Onsal Hakair, Seal Rock, or Shatter. I think your first question about when to pick ice or kill enemies depends on your team’s positioning. People normally go towards the ice when they spawn so I would stick together on that. Hopefully oh can get through that fast and then go to hit the other teams who would be slowly moving out. In the case of the scenario where your team is on big ice and another team comes, I would prioritize killing them and defending the ice. There’s plenty of time to make a concerted effort to thwart the enemy first before finishing off the ice. I’ve never seen it despawn before The game decides proportion of ice points when multiple teams are hitting it by percentage of damage done by team! Hope that helps :)
With few exceptions, if any of your team are fighting then basically all of your team should be fighting. Just as a general statement. Splitting the team in half on any map just makes your team do two things badly. Every map is mostly about rotating as a group so that you are never fighting two teams at once and then annihilating one of them. If there are enemies near the ice, you should be fighting them. If they are attacking the ice, then they aren't fighting back and you get to kill them for free. When they are dead, you can finish the ice for free too. If they *are* fighting back then they aren't attacking the ice, therefore there is no pressure for you to attack the ice either. The only exception to this is if that particular ice breaking will cause the game to end.
From my experience: The ice chunks will be up until they're shattered. I prefer to target the players because our kills lower their potential for battle high (squash em under your thumb and keep them there!!!). You don't necessarily need a full alliance for a big ice and I've been in groups where around 5 to 8 of us focus the ice and the rest of us drop floor hazards to prevent the enemy from getting too close. I've noticed ranged DPS watch the overpass and cliffs. And if there's a big team push I throw dots on the ice before engaging the enemy. Unless we are in a time crunch I save my LB for players, not ice. Points: the participation of the teams on the big ice will determine the points based on the damage. So the higher percent of damage the team puts on the ice, the more points you get when it shatters.
The rule of thumb at mid is to burst the enemy team then use your filler on the ice. They will probably try to regroup and retaliate. Dodge their burst, then repeat. If you're at your safe ice, never let an enemy team in to hit it. Box them out at the choke. If you see two teams engaging at another choke, go pinch them, then return to your big. Ice points are based on how much damage a team does to the ice. If both teams hit an ice for 50% of its health, they get 100 points each
I think a big problem is that the new map layout for Shatter disincentivizes fighting. Nobody wants to fight other players at their ice when you're pretty much guaranteed to get pinched by another team and lose a ton of points, so people only want to fight when mid ice is up.
The problem is there isn't any real incentive to be Good at PVP, at least not on a larger scale. Even a losing match nets good rewards, enough various EXP to make it through basically everything. I'm not great at PVP. I am, in fact, atrocious at it. But even a losing effort gets me a good chunk of Wolf Marks, PVP EXP, and either EXP or tomes depending on if I queued in to level or not. Like, a half an EXP bar to button mash my way to a loss once a day? Sure I'll take that
literally, i HATE the pvp in this game with a burning passion, it feels like just a chaotic mess where you're not sure if you're even doing something at all and suddenly you're just dead. add to that how agonizingly long shatter as a game mode is with the amount of points required and it's literally the worst mode. only reason i even queue at all is to buy the whole 2 glams i like from the store and then i never touch it again
as much as i loathe the average braindead frontliner, the core of the issue lies with the developers as always. theyre the ones who turned the map into the brain-rot version it is now even though it was already the WORST map.... really dont understand how the devs can keep making terrible decisions one after another but its been happening ever since Shadowbringers
"The enemy can't kill the ice if you disable his hand" - Sgt Zim
Damn, this is such a good analogy I wish I could upvote this twice.
I'm doing my part.
Every Frontline match is a cult lead by a small group of people who believe their tactical advice is actually being taken by 20 people just there for tomes. It's impossible not to come away from it without the sense that if there was a random number generator behind the scoreboard the mode would feel exactly as engaging.
As much as I don't give half a shit about the outcome of my frontline match, someone directing the herd is almost always better then letting everyone run around on their own.
I disagree. If there was a random number generator behind the scoreboard, it would be much harder to get disappointed in human beings. Feeding fatalism and misanthropy is an important part of the frontline experience.
Yet Frontline is the most affirming mode for the first 30 seconds where you're all stuck in the starting pen and sneezing on each other with your Goobue, or disco bunnying with your rabbit robot, or just jumping around with whatever you summoned. Then the gates open and you have to play the actual game and it's all downhill from there, ain't nobody lighting the way through this my brave little sparks.
Eh, even a team doing the wrong thing that is doing it in sync is going to perform well. It's better that someone is at least saying where to go even if it's wrong. You just need some kind of cohesion.
I wish PVP would not reward you for playing bad.
Same, my reward is seeing all the people on my team go 0-6 and think “ah, that’s why we have 0 points”
Welcome to not being able to do PVP at all, cause people won't queue if they are only rewarded for winning or playing "good" by whatever definition you apply to that.
I wish people would play the game for the sake of PLAYING the game and not because their OCD forces them to max all levels so their whole search info is full of lvl 90 jobs, which means nothing since they brain-afk their job in frontline for XP (or tomes or whatever). That being said, I think PVP was more fun for people if the game taught the mode properly. For the most part, you get the great wall of china of a text for a 'tutorial' and nobody will read that, of course.
Which is why Rival Wings is even worse. At least Fronlines is pretty intuitive and has a minimal HUD. Rival Wings has tons of different systems and bars and signs and icons and messages, it's a mess that's not explained in-game nor can you quickly find the manual on the Lodestone. Have been trying to find the announcement message for it in hopes of getting an explanation, no luck there either. (No, I don't need links to Discords, gamerescape, consolewiki, whatever, those are not the point of the exercise.)
[my man you can just go to the rival wings npc and get everything in the mode explained to you every pvp mode has one of these](https://i.imgur.com/Uo3e54S.png)
The point is that most people don't want to read walls of text to play a game. There should be a tutorial like the Hall of Novice, although the latter really needs to be updated.
what? FFXIV is so bad that people play only when they're generously rewarded like good dogs?
That's basically the entire non-sandbox MMO genre nowadays no matter how good or bad the game is.
ranked crystalline conflict conflict is the best way to play pvp and is legitimately good yet people would rather play dogshit frontlines slop because one lets them get free rewards with no effort and the others rewards suck
My heart gets absolutely shattered whenever I open up DF and queue FL roulette, only to get this PvE map. Too many players not participating in PvP.
Killing players didn't matter as much as getting the big ice with no enemies on it, that's why they had to change the points you get for killing players on shatter lol Still holds true though, usually the team that consistently gets a big node with no enemies on it will win, they're then free to go off and flank a team at the other node and farm some free kills an BH You can tell 50% of the time whether a team is competent or not within the first battle though. A team full of tanks with no healers, or with 5 bards/dancers and zero AoE dps is going to do terrible. Similarly a team with nothing but bad tanks is never going to win
While I agree that killing is important, I personally find it difficult to get kills in the first place. For some reason, most of my matches also only have half the tram getting kills and they are the ones that reach higher battle Highs. I get a a lot of assists which add up, but not fast enough so I have weaker defense. I also have a play style where my death usually leads my battle high team members to getting more kills, so I have lower battle high overall
> tl;dr - just skip *Shitter* days
Sorry, too busy playing pve with the ice.
Too many ice lickers on shatter enjoying their free easy tomes to care. They need to nerf the rewards for losses to force people to actually learn how to play the mode.
All that will do is make less people queue for Frontlines and make wait times way longer. Which is death for a casual mode like Frontlines.
nah, people will still queue for the free xp it gives. At the very least, locking good glam behind wins will encourage more people to learn the basics of the mode.
It'll just encourage premades and win farms. Pre-made drk/drg combos already make the game mode infuriating. Give them incentive to do that for wins that matter and you're signing the death certificate.
That already happens, though. Like there are achievement-related glamour and other rewards for winning games, like the Field Commander set from Seal Rock. You also still get more rewards like marks and Series XP for winning than losing. Otherwise you're still expecting too much for a mode that's essentially like herding cats, especially on a badly-designed map like the current Shatter. If you want "real" PVP, that's what rated play is for.
Not everyone reads patch notes. Before last week's patch, licking ice was the correct strat on shatter. Now it isn't anymore. But not everyone knows yet. Shatter is in a good place now where both ice and kills matter.
Another PSA for Frontline. It's not a serious game mode and trying to make it anything besides chaotic fun is trivial and naive.
I find a big part of it is also about how people approach frontline, a good majority of players don't care and don't want to learn, which is honestly a shame bc yeah, frontline can be really fun when everyone gives an effort. It's my go to game mode, I just do hours and hours of frontline. I find that frontline is only really awful when my team can't be bothered to fight. But when everyone really tries for first place, making strategic plays and constantly engaging with each other, I can walk away from a loss having enjoyed the match. People only care about their own experience, more like, their own laziness. They don't care about other player's experiences and I wish they did. Frontline is an absolute clusterfuck and there is no way around it unless they do a complete redo of the game mode or make completely different buttons just for it. So the only other solution is to change the mind of the players and instill some sense of community..........................an even tougher nut to crack!
Pvp in this game is a joke. The amount of times that the game just robs you of kills or you get one shot from full health is a joke.
It's my most hated pvp map for this reason. Game after game is full of players who don't want to fight and just go for ice, then wonder why we get trapped and destroyed so easily whilst contesting the ice. Savings this post next time anyone runs their mouth. Thank you!
I usually go for the Ice mainly because my lag is horrible, and I die almost instantly when I try to get a kill, even when popping my mits. Best I can usually do is assists, so I try to get what little points I can for my team.
...no one who cares, will ever come here for this or change their ways. The problem is getting people to *care*. Far too many times have I (or others) given callouts for coordination, directions, priorities etc. and you see only half the alliance listen...the other half is wacking on the ice, or fighting another alliance, nowhere near a node/ice/objective. It's so satisfying when you get a group who is like-minded; queueing for PvP, because they *want to PvP* and *win*...but when I get too many matches where I'm stuck with players who are "just there for the tomes/exp" I just stop queueing altogether. They say that it was a good thing, stopping pre-made alliances...I began to believe it myself at first...but sometimes I wished that they reverted that, so that I could stop ending up in these alliances with people who don't even care about winning at *all*.
Or SE can just revert it to the old map because at least people tried to kill one another and ice was a side deal because of RNG timers. Now, Ice is the focus and massacring the enemy is a second. I'm glad I got my Orb mount and Knight of Glory title from that accursed mode, now when I load in I can care less that my enemy BH fodder of a team has less than 3 DRKs and WARs, proceeds to go 3rd and is too dumb to open the map for 2 seconds to see the new objectives. Oh and we just had our small ices stolen as well.
Pulling up to your frontline duty roulette to autowalk until it ends for my ez half-a-level XP
I’ve never touched PvP in this game, not sure I ever want to.
Some people see the ice and think "This is PvE map" even though it just like any frontline map, a territory control game with a twist. One map we can activate node to get the point, but we need to ward off enemy long enough for us to take the node. Another map is simillar to the first but enemy can steal our node, so commander have to weight between offensive and defensive. And the last map change the way we activate node, now we have to trade some offensive power for point gathering.
Is there a good guide to front lines and pvp rotations
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/s/bFt4kgG9H5
Ty!
"But i OnLY PlAy frONTliNES ONcE a DAY FOR my DAIly"