Enemies in firefight do not respond well to player actions such as being shot or being hit.
Soldiers will charge players while boasting incredibly high health pools and don’t flinch to melees or bullets until their armor is broken which takes an entire pistol mag or AR mag. This allows them to charge in without consequence or warp in and just blast a player down. This is part of the reason defend rounds are so obnoxious. Prometheans just walk through damage without flinching. It would be nice if they would at least move for cover when I am emptying a magazine of AR into one at close range instead of just charging forward with a suppressor/scattershot/turret/whateverhaveyou. Even if they would just flinch when I strike them with a melee instead of just not reacting and slapping me away with a single punch like a silly grunt or something. The soldiers with the larger helmets (Majors?) can take 3-4 gauss rounds which is ridiculous.
Jackals with the orange shields have both too much health and don’t flinch enough. They can be standing right on a frag grenade and it often won’t kill them. I have shot them in the hands and feet many times and they just don’t seem to care while firing their weapons at absurd rates. To top it off, you can melee them(which used to stagger them in past halos) and many times they don’t flinch and just smack you right back before mowing you down.
Most elites react to being shot at by either running or flinching and will sometimes stagger when punched. The ones I can’t stand are the gold elites. They will chase you to the ends of the earth with weapons that don’t seem to overheat or have a magazine to worry about. It takes an entire BR mag to lower their shields and they can kill you in half that time. The problem I have with them is that they tend to hang around the spawn on Stormbreak and Darkstar and will mow down players as they spawn, which on high waves means you can go anywhere from 45-60 seconds without being able to do anything all because a gold elite survived the first phase of a round.
Why did they give mythic hunters a tracking fuel rod cannon? This thing tracks like a plasma pistol at times and kills a spartan in one hit. Some knights with incineration cannons have the same tracking behavior, yet when I pick up their weapons after their death, it is either just a standard incineration cannon or river of light(neither of which seek). Tracking weapons are just lazy and cheap. I was ok with boltshot having some tracking, but the suppressor too? I don’t have a problem with them when players use them but they are incredibly annoying in the hands of ai who have 2-4x the healthpool.
I wish ai weapons at least followed the same rules that ours do. High ranking elites can spam their storm rifles without overheating with incredible accuracy(ours can fire for about 2.5 seconds(I think) before over heating and become quite inaccurate if not burst fired. Gold elites with fuel rods just don’t reload. They just fire away with a bottomless magazine at times. Knights can sometimes spam the incineration cannon firing fully charged blasts without charging.
Another gripe is the range that soldiers will engage you at. The soldier bosses with turrets on Apex can blast you with the gauss cannon from a very long range, I have been shot a second after spawning a few times on that round. Also, many enemies aim at your through the wall(hunters and knights are the worst offenders). I have been killed several times barely coming around a corner simply because the ai was already aiming at me before I was even in view.
The placements of a couple bosses is pretty bad as well. The legendary grunt mech on Apex spawn down by the beach behind 10-20 knights. His volley attack shreds any vehicles as you have to become exposed to really hit him and he tends to hide up near the cave quite often. The wardens should be on the beach, not in the water. The fact that they are out in the water behind 20-30 enemies is just annoying. There’s really no way to get behind them as you can only approach from 3 directions. All of the Warden spawns in the main bases just suck. They should be out in the open somewhere, not tucked into a small little cubby like a tacky Christmas sweater.
The same thing applies to vehicles. The mantis bosses can fire far longer without overheating and regenerate their health(not shields) insanely fast if you stop shooting at them for even a moment. Soldiers in warthogs sometimes fire their chainguns without overheating far longer than a player can. Health is also an issue. Ai vehicles often have more health than player controlled ones. One example is the rocket hogs on Sanctum(not the boss ones). It takes 3-4 volleys to kill one with a rocket hog yet they can kill your rocket hog in just two volleys. The same thing applies to banshees. I takes me 2-3 fuel rods to kill an AI banshee yet it only takes them 1-2 to take down my banshee. All of these vehicles I am talking about are standard variants(excluding boss mantises). Phaetons are a large offender. I see them spam the rockets and pulse cannons all the time without overheating.
I am not trying to say firefight is too hard. It isn’t, it is very doable. I just find it more annoying and tedious than I find it fun a lot of the time. Fighting enemies in previous firefight modes was neither most of the time. I get that firefight has to be tuned and challenging for 8 players. They do that already with the sheer number of enemies. There are easily 60+ enemies per round. There’s no reason to turn every standard enemy into a bullet sponge or give them special properties. Save that stuff of the bosses. 343 somehow made the mistake of thinking that bullet sponges=fun enemies. I really hope they look back at bungie when designing the enemies for Halo 6.