Whether you’re into Dungeons, Raids, Golden Saucer games, Crafting, or something inbetween, FFXIV has an enormous catalog of activities on offer. While there’s already a lot to do, maybe you want to collect all of the exclusive rewards, level up your classes, or break out from the monotony of running the same PvE activities and play a dynamic game mode with friends.
Frontlines is the best place to get your fix on everything in one exciting activity. Unlike Crystalline Conflict, Frontlines allows players to play with their friends and enjoy not just one but four different kinds of maps and gamemodes. Better yet, a single game of Frontlines from your daily roulette will always give you at least half of your class leveling xp making it an extremely desirable activity to run, albeit once a day, to level your classes swiftly.
Frontlines is a large-scale PvP mode in Final Fantasy 14 where three teams of up to 24 players each compete against each other to capture and control various objectives on a battlefield. Teams are divided into three Grand Companies: The Maelstrom (Grand Company of Limsa Lominsa), The Order of the Twin Adder (Grand Company of Gridania), and The Immortal Flames (Grand Company of Ul'dah).
The requirements to unlock Frontlines in your duty finder, or to play with up to 3 of your friends, are quite simple. You must reach level 30 in any combat class and complete the quest “Like Civilized Men and Women”. This quest can be found wherever your Grand Company’s main city is located such as Ul'dah, New Gridania, and Limsa Lominsa. Make sure to visit the Wolves’ Den Pier once you complete the quest to configure your PVP hotbar, as it is very different from the regular PVE hotbar that you’ve been leveling up so far.
FFXIV PvP, and Frontlines by extension, offers a wide array of new rewards to collect alongside a fresh way to play and master your character’s classes. Every class has a unique and evolving rotation, accentuating their class identity in PvP games. A key difference between the PVE and PvP hotbars are the extra abilities such as Recuperate, Purify, Guard, Elixir, and Sprint (A special PVP one; your PVE bind won’t work in PVP).
Related
These abilities are common and can be used in every class, and it is highly recommended that you apply them to your hotbar to avoid those pesky stuns in PVP and Frontlines most especially. Most of your class’s PVE abilities are still there as well as their main functions, so it isn’t a large learning curve by any means, however, you will soon learn to play differently with all of them as other players won’t be standing still for you to hit them freely unlike the mobs of enemies in PVE.
However, Frontlines isn’t just one large scale campaign but rather a daily rotating playlist of unique and distinct game modes including: The Borderland Ruins (Secure), Seal Rock (Seize), The Fields of Glory (Shatter), and Onsal Hakair (Danshig Naadam). Each of the four game modes plays differently but follows the overarching rules of a Frontline campaign. You can also call your mount in a Frontlines match!
These main rules are Battle High and Limit Break. The Limit Break in Frontlines functions slightly differently from Crystalline Conflict’s Limit Break in that, depending on your team’s place, your Limit Break gauge may fill faster. If your team is 1st, the gauge fills 0.75 times faster. If you’re 2nd, it will fill at the usual rate and, at 3rd place, the gauge will fill 1.25 times faster. It’s a minor change on paper, but when teams are formed of 24 players each respectively, a coordinated Limit Break push can tip the scales of the battle in a different direction at a moments notice.
Battle High is a PVP special status that can be generated by earning player knockouts and assists. The Battle High status has 5 increasing bonuses that bolsters your damage dealt as well as healing potency as you increase your status rating up to a limit of 100. To start, Battle High I(1) grants a 10 percent increase in damage dealt and healing potency and each consecutive level of Battle High boosts that percentage by 10 up to 50% at Battle V(5). Getting knocked out reduces the rating by half, so try to stay alive, and stick to your team for more damage and healing!
Frontlines Tips
Immediately bind Recuperate, Purify, and Guard to whatever keys you can press the fastest. In a game where you will go head to head with 48 players, all of them will have skills that can stun, sleep, slow, or debuff you in a myriad of ways and easily become frustrating at times when their attacks are coordinated and focused. Knowing when to dance between these three skills and the abilities of your class can really help your survivability in Frontlines whether it’s escaping the enemies’ grasp or going in for the swift takedown.
The Borderland Ruins (Secure)
In this map, players must work together to capture and hold strategic points on the battlefield. The objective is simple: capture flags, defeat your opponents, and slay the drones that spawn in the inner arena for extra points. The map is divided into two areas: the inner arena, which contains monsters that will occasionally spawn and reward additional points upon defeat, and the outer arena, which has six flags that can be captured to gain points over time as the clock winds down.
Starting with the outer area, players spawn in their respective starting zones and must quickly move to capture the nearby points. Each point is marked with a flag and will take time to capture once standing on its platform. The more allies that stand in the platform the faster it can be captured. If an enemy stands on the platform while your team does, progress will be halted until there is only one team surviving on said platform. Once a flag is captured, it will increase a team’s score with a fixed amount over time. In addition to capturing and holding points, players can also engage in combat with enemy players to disrupt their progress and defend their own captured objectives.
At fixed intervals during the campaign, the inner arena will begin a timer of 30s that can be seen in your minimap that spawns additional monsters for your team to slay. The more damage that is done to these drones, the more points your team can get. Sometimes during a match it might be a better choice to focus on getting a headstart on reaching the inner arena to, not only prevent other teams from trying to slay the drones, but to take control of the inner arena and earn more points by monopolizing the drones. Don’t be afraid to make callouts to your team in the alliance chat, coordinating timings and offensive pushes is key to winning in this game mode.
Related
The Borderlands Ruins Tips
There are times in these gamemodes where you’re perfectly fine to capture points alone and other times when you should really be fighting with the team. Focusing the factions that are in the lead and picking them off as a team is one of the fastest ways to dominate on this map, even if the drones provide extra points. Also, be careful going up the stairs, some classes offer knockback effects and players will absolutely take advantage of that to get some early denies on you and your team… Taking advantage of that yourself can help your team control the middle area when the drones spawn easier.
Seal Rock (Seize)
While similar in some regards to The Borderland Ruins, Seal Rock shares some elements but its gameplay is contrasting compared to it. In Seal Rock, the objective of this frontline campaign is to activate and extract data from tomeliths that spawn across the map. In other words, players must work together to capture points and hold them as the match progresses. Once a tomelith is completely extracted it deactivates and another one spawns somewhere else on the map.
However, here is where the complexity of this seize campaign turns it into its owndistinctive branch. There are three ranks to the tomeliths; A, B, and S. Rank B tomeliths provide the standard amount of data that can be extracted, however A and S tomeliths hold greater pools of data (or points). During matches, you’ll notice entire teams coordinate and stop in their tracks to turn to the direction of rank A tomeliths and especially Rank S tomeliths. Rank S tomeliths are capable of flipping the scores completely, giving teams that are at the bottom of the scoreboard a chance to almost instantly become first place instead.
Another difference between the seize and secure campaign, is that in Seal Rock, defeating your opponents doesn’t only gain your team any extra points but rather decreases the score the opponent team has. So it is entirely possible for a team to complete a match with 0 points scored!
Seal Rock Tips
Seize campaigns can become a game of careful balance between disrupting the leading team or focusing on capturing and holding as many tomeliths as you can. It is important to not spread out too much, however. Given the random nature of the spawn points of the tomeliths, it is entirely possible for them to spawn much further away from your grand company's respawn zone, making them difficult to reach, let alone capture.
The Fields of Glory (Shatter)
Frontline shatter campaigns set themselves apart from the others by having players destroy the objectives rather than capturing them. Additionally, each team has a tomelith spawn point, so to speak, that can be captured by opposing grand companies. In shatter campaigns the objectives that must be destroyed in order to obtain points are called Icebound Tomeliths. There are two kinds, large and small, the tomeliths are spread all over the battlefield and activate randomly at sporadic moments of the match.
Small icebound tomeliths spawn more frequently and provide a steady amount of points, whereas large icebound tomeliths spawn infrequently but provide a substantial amount of points. You can see the locations of the icebound tomeliths on your map and if you hover over them you can find out if they are active, inactive, or if there is a 30 second countdown until they activate.
Moreover, players can knock out their opponents to increase their own points as well as decrease the enemy’s score. You can also capture their spawn allagan tomelith to generate a small amount of points over time as the match continues. The center of the map is usually where all three grand companies coalesce so sometimes this gamemode can lend itself to more sneaky elements of gameplay where players can hunt down outliers such as small icebound tomeliths at the edges of the map, lone players, or even an allagan tomelith if your daring enough!
Related
Fields of Glory Tips
Keep your eyes on the map, the tomeliths are genuinely random and teams that can bottleneck and reach chokepoints to the larger icebound tomeliths have a better chance at coordinating successful team fights. The small outlier tomeliths are valuable of course, but all teams prioritize the larger ones. A smart team that’s ahead of the game can control the map and not only get the points from the large icebound tomelith, but also from defeating two enemy teams.
Onsal Hakair (Danshig Naadam)
Onsal Hakair absorbs elements from the previous campaigns and transforms the game into an explosive game mode. Sharing features from Secure, Seize, and Shatter campaigns Onsal Hakair is a mosh pit style game mode fitting for where the campaign takes place in final fantasy 14 lore. The objective of this campaign is to capture Ovoos, and knock out your opponents.
Ovoos are a combination of allagan tomeliths and secure flags. Sprinkled all over the map, are ovoos that can spawn in the different ranks: B, A, and S. In the beginning of matches there will be frequent numbers of ovoos active but they will be low in rank. As the match nears its end however, the number of ovoos will decrease but their ranks will increase in return.
Ovoos once captured cannot be intercepted by another team, so players must win the initial battle once an ovoo has spawned otherwise it will be lost to them. They can however, mitigate these losses by focusing on other higher rank ovoos or focusing on defeating their opponents thereby decreasing their score and increasing their own at the same time.
Onsal Hakair Tips
The center of the Onsal Hakair map is notorious for housing the most powerful ranking ovoos early mirroring the rush of combat that can be found in Secure campaigns but the rest of the map is open to other ovoos as well. Even if they are not as valuable as S rank or A rank ovoos, maintaining steady map control by defeating opponents and consistently capturing B ranks can have your team stealthily make it to the top score and win the game under your enemy’s nose.
