It's well-established that this particular quest is divisive, but for the most part I'd argue it accomplished exactly what it intended to do. The objective of the solo duty is to force a perspective-flip on the player, make them feel weak, helpless, frustrated, desperate, and so on; it's supposed to be a very real struggle, forcing you to adapt to a tough situation without the advantages and tools you normally have.

The one catch is... quite frankly, many simply didn't get it. The moment they lose their power fantasy, nothing else matters except they're being denied the power trip they've grown accustomed to.

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That being said, it could be argued the ending and follow-through for the solo duty were lacking.

Zenos doesn't manage to cause any damage, but at the same time the last-minute save does feel earned (surprisingly few people notice that the ending crawl actually has the player speeding up, almost as if they were about to stand back up). Still, him actually managing to hurt others (possibly killing off a named NPC or two, if not necessarily a member of the Scions) instead of being intercepted at the last second would have made him a much more hated foe. Even then, at the time I felt they did a great job of re-establishing how big a threat Zenos was.

... which brings me to the follow through, in that they don't really do anything with Zenos afterwards. He does have some appearances afterwards, but they definitely could have made him into a much more dangerous threat (if not necessarily the most interesting character) if he showed up and caused some damage. I suppose it was contrary to what they wanted to do with the character in end, but Zenos is a character which really needed a (good) reason to be despised.