: I do wish that difficulty wasn't based so much on making you weaker or
: boosting enemy damage and such though. Sure, things like firing faster or
: more accurately have an ultimate end result of increasing difficulty, but
: they feel a little less cheap (in Reach, for instance, I was constantly
: frustrated that Elites would almost always 1HK you with their kick melee,
: which meant for all practical purposes, melee was a useless tactic on
: higher difficulties.)

: I'd much rather have a difficulty curve where on higher levels Elites were
: more aggressive, or Grunts would be more likely to swarm you, or Jackals
: would strafe around the terrain and flank you. Something where it felt
: less like the developers are just amping the difficulty via a button (I
: have similar complaints with some of the skulls, as well, but since
: they're optional they don't bother me that much.)

I made some commentary on the issue in my Ultimate Halo Game article, saying:

Personally, I think that the trend towards making enemies as overwhelmingly powerful as possible is a bad one. It considerably reduces the amount of viable tactics available to the player, essentially shoehorning them into a very specific play style — usually one that discourages aggressive movement and that’s heavily cover-based —, one that if deviated from will result in repeated death. Most of the challenge of facing an individual enemy should come from things like quality AI rather than brute force (no pun intended). As the saying goes, fight smarter, not harder. That should apply not just to the player but to the NPCs as well. If the enemies are sufficiently intelligent then they wouldn’t need to inflict absurd amounts of damage; in fact, if they were really smart and inflicted as much damage as they did in Halo 2 or 3, it would result in the game being rather cheap on higher difficulties (refer again to Reach). There are plenty of other factors that go into a game’s challenge, including but not limited to:

• Overall resilience of the enemy (i.e., shield and health levels).
• The performance of the enemy AI.
• The presence, number, and general effectiveness of friendly AI.
• Overall effectiveness/performance of the player’s weapons (damage, accuracy, etc.).
• Whether or not the player has regenerating health.
• Level design, which affects the flow of combat.
• Encounter design, i.e., number, placement, and rank distribution of the enemies, and presence/absence of multi-sided battles.
• Availability of ammo, weapons, and other supplies.
• The weapons and other gear the enemies are equipped with.
• The presence, nature, and frequency of “Demonic Spiders” and “Goddamned Bats.”
• Gameplay elements that could qualify as “Fake Difficulty.”

Quality enemy AI, coupled with good encounter & objective design and proper utilization of the other aforementioned difficulty-altering factors (except of course Fake Difficulty, which should always be avoided) would result in a challenge that legitimately tests the player’s skills rather than just their patience. Despite the enemies inflicting less damage in Halo 1, the game is to me still as challenging as Halo 3, Reach, and Halo 4 (if we go by total number of deaths) but it was balanced in a way that made its challenge fun instead of frustrating. Therefore, if I was making a Halo game I would reduce the base damage output of the enemies back to Halo 1 levels (i.e., typically about half the player’s base damage output) and would focus on those other, better ways to enhance the difficulty.

I still stand by this. Making the enemies inflict insane amount of damage should be down towards the bottom of the list of proposed ways of boosting difficulty. It's the lazy and cheap way of making things harder, and it doesn't really produce a legitimate challenge in and of itself. I die about as much and as frequently in Halo 1 as in Halo 3, Reach, and Halo 4, yet the enemies in Halo 1 inflict much less damage. It's also no surprise that I default to Legendary in Halo 1, whereas I don't default to Legendary in the other games, but that's because Halo 1 is the fun kind of challenging.