On one hand, the Convicts were
much more forgiving in the previous Nightwave than the current Zealots: While they hit arguably as hard, they were also much more fragile and did so predominantly with the much less dangerous Fire element.
On the other, haha
the Wolf was absolutely broken and the current Zealots - bad as they are - are at least ostensibly
kill-able with non-cheesed newbie solo-player builds (conversely, I remember one Relic hunt wherein I pumped at least a solid 60-70 Potato-Forma'd Vectis Prime shots
directly into his head and he didn't go down).
But yeah, DE probably should do something about the sheer ratio of Nightwave objectives that are literally impossible to complete without having reached at least Second Dream / War Within. The compare-contrast between my closed-beta PC account (which can often blow through any of the non-timelocked Nightwave weekly objectives in... well, 1-2 days) and my fresh-start console one (which is often lucky if it can complete half of a week's objectives, including some of the Dailies) is a bit brutal when it's replacing an Alert system that was... relatively allowing, of the "Higher-MR Player Taxi Service" technique (conversely a lot of the current Nightwave objectives literally
will not let you Taxi because they're quest- or syndicate-locked: Can't invite people to Ropalyst, Profit-Taker, 30-min Kuva Survival, Kuva Siphons / Floods, Halls of Ascension, etc).
It's still
possible (at MR5 and 37 days of playing on the console, without a support network, and also dumping time into Dog Days, I'm
still at Nightwave Rank 15), but part of that is having foreknowledge from PC (Start with Volt to trivialize Plains of Eidolon fishing; Skip the Cetus mining gun and skip straight to the Fortuna one; Get a Tranq gun ASAP for Plains reputation; Use starting Plat on a Warframe and x4 weapon slots; Use Nightwave Creds for Energy Siphon / Corrosive Projection / Steel Charge then Nitain and Potatoes; Always take Tellurium from starting Daily Log Ins; Run for those T2 and T3 Nightmare Mods; Buy Sol Widget for Synthesis Scanner ASAP; Plow through Stolen Dreams ASAP so you can pawn Ayatans and pass the Endo bottleneck; get Carrier ASAP; Don't sell the Flawed Equilibrium because the non-Flawed one is rare as fuck; Replace Mk1 and Skana with Hek and Dual Zoren) and luck (Dog Days meant I could get Medi-Ray within my first 1-2 weeks, and a non-consumable Health Restore is
huge; Literally my first infested mission had High Noon drop) and I can only
imagine what the casual experience would be like for a couple "Hey, let's all start playing WF together" persons with no real foreknowledge.
Also, forewarning
@ZeroVoidTime : Do the weekly Ayatan runs whenever possible, and try to have at least three Ayatans always unfilled in your inventory. Sometimes "Fill three Ayatans" is a Nightwave objective, and it's
infinitely easier to have them already on-hand than trying to hunt them in missions. Also Ayatan runs are a quick access point to the Void, and Void missions drop mods from containers (with missions base level 20+ having a chance of dropping the
extremely important Multishot and Efficiency mods). Also as a forewarning, there will eventually come a point wherein Redirection and Vitality only help so much with your endurance: Eventually you're going to want a frame that can make itself invisible (such as aforementioned Ivara, Loki, or Ash), make itself either invulnerable or effectively so (Rhino, Nezha, and Valkyr all immediately spring to mind), or has some way to deflect incoming fire (Frost, Volt, and Zephyr all say hello here). This is because you will see shit like bleed procs doing 100+ damage a tick, Nightmare enemies doing almost as much damage per bullet on an automatic hit-scan weapon, or so-on.