I would love to see more individually challenging enemies

[dudefaceguy]

What I Like

I recently did some solo John Prodman runs in the Index, and found them to be extremely rewarding. At high levels, the enemies become individually challenging and interesting. I had to develop several different strategies to deal with the different challenges that they presented. For example: radiation damage on a melee weapon deals tons of damage to these enemies' alloy armor, but Raptor RX flies above melee range, does tons of damage to me, and has lots of shields that resist radiation damage. Figuring out how to kill it quickly at high levels, and then executing this technique consistently, was a fun challenge.

I think there were two thing that made it really interesting and fun:

1. I had to use a combination of different techniques to defeat a single enemy, and executing these combos was satisfying.

2. The different enemies required different techniques to defeat, so I had to vary my playstyle depending on what I was fighting.

Criticisms

This is in contrast to Sanctuary Onslaught (and the rest of Warframe). It focuses on killing cannon fodder units as fast as possible, which is already what we do in the rest of Warframe. This reinforces the same old "meta" of spin-to-win melee and AoE nuke abilities. It's a fun game mode; I like it because you can instantly start at high-level content, and because it's a great place to stress-test builds for deployment elsewhere. But, I'm also a little disappointed that it places even more emphasis on indiscriminate slaughter rather than engaging with high-level enemies in a more thoughtful way. Warframe's horde mode is super fun, but it would be nice to have a change of pace without having to wait an hour to get there.

Suggestion

I would love to see a game mode that provides high-level challenge in the form of individually challenging enemies. For example: you spawn into a tile which contains a single set of challenging enemies, and you have to kill them all within a certain time limit. If you fail, you can try again against the same spawns, in order to tweak your strategy. For example, a level-150 Grineer tile could spawn a Rathuum executioner, an eximus Napalm, a few Heavy Gunners, a Tusk Mortar Bombard, Corrupted Vor, and Kuva Guardians. Your squad would have to come up with a strategy to defeat them on the fly.

You guys are the game designers so I'm sure you could think of a better way to do it. The point is that I had a lot of fun fighting the level 250 Index enemies, coming up with strategies to defeat them, and employing these strategies. Different types of enemies demanded different tactics, and I was rewarded for changing my tactics depending on the enemy, rather than just spamming the same thing over and over again until it stopped working and time ran out. I would love to see more of this kind of thing in Warframe.