Unlocking/Entry:
Complete "A Pup No Longer (YourGCname)", accepted at your GC, to unlock Wolves' Den. Return to GC and complete "Like Civilized Men and Women (YourGCname)" to unlock Frontline.
Currently you can only queue with people in the same Grand Company as you; keep in mind that you can only change GCs once you hit Second (Flame/Storm/Serpent) Lieutenant, the current highest rank. And there is also a 15 day lockout and 50k fee for changing GCs (the fee is waived for the very first change).
Who's in my Data Center?
Spoiler: show
Match Overview
Adjusted map; blue lines indicate ledges along the outer paths. Blue circles indicate "shortcut rocks"; you can jump through these to take a little shortcut around mid area. Practice it.
Spoiler: show
To claim a flag for your faction, you need more people than another faction standing inside the circle. The more you outnumber, the faster you claim. So it's important, whenever you can, for people to fight inside the flag when you do not have ownership of it.
The following point values are for a 72man (3 parties vs 3 parties vs 3 parties) match; there are small adjustments for lower-size matches.
Turning a base/outpost from Neutral to your faction: +10 points
Killing a player: +5
Killing(majority damage) a Drone: +20 points
Killing(majority damage) a Node: +200 points (+100 for 48man)
Bonus for holding bases/outposts: Depends on how many
1: 1/tick
2: 2/tick
3: 4/tick
4: 8/tick
5: 16/tick
6: 32/tick (unconfirmed)
Matches are played to 1600 (72man), 1200 (48man, Node is worth half points), or 800 (24man, A/C side bases are inactive).
Stay with your party. Being split up generally accomplishes nothing.
In a typical 72man, 3 party match, team A goes "left", C goes "right" and B goes mid / backup. For example if you are Immortal Flames, your A is going to Temple and your C is going Markets. The base opposite of your team's spawn (Manors in this case) should generally not be touched at all; takes too long to get over there and it typically turns into a 3-way battle.
Frontline is not about big battles. It's a game of relieving and applying pressure; mostly to the healers.
Team A / C:
A/C's goal is to take the A/C side base and hold it. If you take it cleanly, you can push to that side's outpost and even spawn-camp them. Of course other teams also want to do that so this is heavily dependent on group coordination from DPS and defending your healers.
Sometimes a team will send more than 1 party to A or C, or send multiple healers making it very difficult to kill them all. In these situations it is generally better to fall back and push a more lightly defended location rather than stay and give them free kills. The extra people are either pugs who aren't obeying orders or B team who will eventually have to go to mid.
Do not go to mid. That's B's job. If B sucks there isn't much you can do about it.
Team B:
6 Interceptor Drones spawn in mid (Heliodrome) at 27:00 on duty timer, and then every 3 minutes after the last Drone dies. An Interceptor Node spawns somewhere around 20 to 22 minutes remaining; unsure of exact spawn condition yet. Kill credit is awarded for majority damage; if your GC does 51% damage to a drone, you don't have to hit it anymore.
So you typically have a couple minutes between each drone spawn to do something and then come back up early. B should be on the way to mid from wherever they were at least 1 minute early (so around 28:00 if making the 27:00).
Do keep in mind that Mid is at a high elevation; knockback from Fluid Aura, Aura Blast (SCH), Blast Shot (BRD), Mythril Tempest / Holmgang (WAR), and Garuda can be fatal.
It's a point of debate whether B should stay in mid for drones or go assist A/C in some way. From experience, you can usually go do stuff for a bit after the 27:00 drones, but after the next set around 23ish you should stay in mid until the node and next drones.
Rewards
1st/2nd/3rd place
400/300/200 exp
600/450/300 wolf marks
Every loss you personally suffer will give you a stacking 10% bonus to EXP earned until you win a match. I don't know if there's a cap to it.
PvP Actions
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You can make a keybind for PvP profile in Keybind > Shortcuts (there is no default iirc).
You get 1 Action Point for every rank you earn in PvP, the max PvP rank is 40, and buying 1 rank of an action or trait costs 4 AP. So by 40 you will have 10 upgrades to spend.
All actions are available from the start; the AP you earn by leveling just buys upgrades for them or extra STR/DEX/VIT/etc from traits. You do not have to buy them "in order"; for Aura Blast in the above screenshot you can just upgrade the cooldown and knockback distance, leaving the (lol) potency buff alone.
You can refund your points anytime by hitting the Default button in PvP Profile > Actions and Traits. This will un-set any PvP actions in Actions and Traits (the bottom screenshot) as well, so be sure to re-set those before leaving the starting gate. You can set them outside of the gate, but they will be on cooldown and you cannot do it while "engaged".
You can change jobs at any time in the starting area; because of this you should always try to go all-out in your point investment in one job, and just refund if you are switching. A macro like below is helpful for this:
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Mechanical Differences from PvE / Death and Raising
-Any attacks that deal direct damage (such as Miasma, Fire, Heavy Shot, etc) will always interrupt spellcasting, unless the caster is using Surecast, Equanimity, or the damage is prevented by Stoneskin / Adloquium / Manawall / Manaward.
--Pet attacks do not inherently interrupt casting, but the Stun/knockback can.
-Bards have a ranged damage penalty; around the distance where you end up after Repelling Shot is the "sweet spot". Being closer or father than this makes you do less damage.
-If hit by an attack that does direct damage while on a mount, a 20s Heavy effect will be inflicted. SMN/SCH take note that you want to tag them with Ruin 2 or Aero, not Bio. Or sleep/bind them on their mount.
-"Purify" can be used on other people. Healers take care not to accidentally use on someone else when you meant to use it on yourself.
-The healer PvP action "Divine Breath" will revive without giving weakness.
-After being raised, you have about 5 seconds of total invincibility to damage as long as you do not use any action, including Sprint, Mount, or healing yourself.
--You are not immune to status-inflicting attacks that do not inflict damage, such as Sleep, or Lethargy.
-When you die in Frontline, you must wait 5 seconds before you can hit Return. Every consecutive death adds 5 seconds.
--You only get increasing penalty if you Return; being raised does not increase the respawn timer.
-On that note, you can use Return while alive to go back to home base as long as you are not engaged.
Jobs / Gearing Up
Melee LB1 has been observed to do around 5k-5.4k damage depending on if there's a gimp weapon in the party.
Caster LB1 is around 3.5k and is hard to dodge unless you were already on the edge.
Melee LB2 typically does 10-11k damage.
Caster LB2 is basically AoE oneshot, but is easy to walk out of. Coordinate with stuns sleeps or binds.
Remember that people can see caster LB circle. Can scare them by feinting it once or twice.
Morale does not work in Frontline, so PvP gear is relatively useless here due to having only one secondary. The effects of materia are also not counted. Defense and Magic Defense also do nothing. Buffs that affect "Damage Dealt / Damage Received", like Raging Strikes and Sentinel, do function normally.
Accuracy is a functionally pointless stat in PvP; hit/miss chance is only modified by Evasion moves like Featherfoot / Attunement, and Blind effects. Because of this you want to try to avoid any gear that has Accuracy on it. For tank gear, Parry is also pretty pointless.
Maximize Det/Crit/Speed secondaries on all gear where possible. Because of the i80 sync, a i90 piece with crit/speed is better than a i110 piece with acc/speed. A i80 piece with crit/det and a i100 piece with crit/det are equally good, and so on.
Tanks: Forget VIT. Use STR accs. You're a DPS.
Healers: Forget MND, use VIT accs. You're a tank. Most VIT accs unfortunately have Parry/Acc/Skillspeed but it's not something you can really help. The PvP VIT accs usually have crit/det so they are actually not bad picks. Do not forget about Surecast; it's actually useful here.
Melee: You basically have 2-3 Invigorates (Invigorate, Enliven, PvP TP meds if you desire), so don't be stingy about using Sprint to chase down people.
Party Formation:
-A and C should each have 3 healers; at least 1 WHM and SCH.
-B should have 2 healers.
-One person capable of crowd control at least is a must. BLM is ideal for this imo.
-1 tank at most, MRD or PLD.
-At least 1 BRD in B.