The only thing I agree with you on. The rest is just about making game harder for everybody because a small percentage of top performing players are bored, it’s not the right direction at all. Game is already hard enough that you regularly see missions failed in Damnation already, which is “average” difficulty, so most played. There is no need to aggravate majority of players making the game less enjoyable for them.
For higher difficulties - fine, some tweaks could be done. But they must not be back-ported to the rest of the game, they need to be “quarantined” there.
I wonder if that’s true based on the “Attrition” section. There’s a lot of moments in this game where instead of “I’m dying” it’s “I’m dead”. And in my experience that’s a hard pill for new players — “oh yeah that just happens I’ll rez ya”
Enemy spam contributes a lot to creating scenarios that are difficult to get out of if you don’t prevent them beforehand, and the sheer power of player mobility means there’s a lot of learned reflexes that turn damage into a binary situation. Which again is harder on the amateurs/adepts than the experts.
Besides, damage numbers can always be tweaked to make sure win rates don’t plummet.
I have found this feeling in duos and I LOVE it. Disablers/minigames/bosses are extra challenging though!