Normally you focus light attack spam or hard attack stunlock spam him right in his face to whittle the Elite Predator down, but I've been thinking there could be a way to quickly burst him using one of the explosive canisters around the map. Basically I've been trying to find a way to lure him down to one immediately and have it blow up right under his kilt, which CAN do a ton of damage but is also really risky and pretty inconsistent right now. Here's a clip of me pulling it off decently: https://streamable.com/3oq9s The canister in the far right front corner, facing from where he jumps down from, is closer to where he spawns but he seems to take longer to get over there for me right now, it seems like if he doesn't have nearish line of sight with you he'll just start jumping all over the arena randomly or try just using his plasma caster a lot. I've also tested with blowing up the canister without trying to push it out of its spawning location but it doesn't seem to really do damage in that location. My best guess is that the rocks and bricks stacked around the base are somehow blocking it all since they go flying everywhere but you and the Elite Predator standing right next to it won't take any damage or knockback from it. Since it also spawns a little far away from him I find standing and kicking it like a soccer ball serves to both bring it closer and guarantee it'll actually do damage so I just set that up while he's jumping down. Just like the Predalien fight it seems like the direction he chooses to jump at the start is seemingly random, which sucks, and him jumping straight forward seems to be the worst place he can go. If he jumps to his left or his right he'll end up on ground level after just two jumps where he'll immediately run and try hitting me with a long distance leap attack which gives me a pretty consistent set up for when to ignite the canister. If he goes straight forward he'll take at least 3 jumps to reach ground level and may open with something like a hard or light attack instead which can make things a bit trickier. The canister does a LOT more damage to you as an alien than to him so you want him to have his back to it with you facing it so you're the farthest from it you can be and he the closest. Here's the fastest I've managed to get it so far: https://streamable.com/yudaa I'm looking ideally for something more consistent than focus light attack spam since he can try charged attacks that knock himself down and around that can cause attacks to miss and waste time or even block. Not to mention the nature of melee fights while that close to an enemy with the wonky physics the aliens have makes the fight sometimes become needlessly more obnoxious than necessary just because something fucky happens. I had a fight where he blocked nearly 1/3 of all my attacks that took forever that made me say enough is enough and want to blow the ugly motherfucker up.

Oddly enough the Elite Predator hasn't been much of an issue for me, holding right and spamming light attacks seems to dominate him every time. The others however I can't do for the life of me.

Would the barrels only be viable on full health?

Cool concept although would find it hard to justify doing with the initial point mentioned of his jumping being kind of random. If you get a good fight it is usually one light attack followed by heavy attack stun lock to the end. I admittedly need to spend some more time practicing the last fight as I have been relearning and working on some more consistency in the end game.

You would need to have this consistent and fast enough where it beats the heavy attack loop.

A bit more of an update on this, I'm still trying at it and I think it's been going pretty well. Overall I can get him to head straight for ground level to jump attack me instead of just jump around, the key to that is to keep line of sight with him since the moment he lands on the first platform. If you have a platform between you and him at the crucial moments when he's first jumping down he usually chooses to just jump to another high platform in the arena and use his plasma caster. If you do maintain line of sight, although the path he can take seems random still, he'll always head down to ground level and he tends to jump to his right which is great since that's the closest platform. Also for reliability this seems to work fine if you play a bit cautiously even when not at full health. Since he always opens on ground level with a jump attack you can pretty reliably set him up to block it and knock him down. Plenty of the Elite Predator or normal Predator's light hits will knock you down even when blocked but for some reason his leap attack never does here. The main thing for ensuring he takes as much damage and you as little is to time the explosion to blow while he's knocked down from your counter attack. Essentially when he's jumping down you want to hit the canister so it blows shortly after you block his jump attack. Here's a clip of a few things in action: https://streamable.com/a6he7

1. No matter where you seem to be in the arena you will have time to reach the canister and push it around before he hits ground level. This is nice since the Predators themselves also feel really random to me right now so no matter what they do they won't ruin the setup.
2. When he's first landing I stopped pushing the canister around because I'd have broke line of sight with him if I tried to get it in position and he might have jumped off to some high platform and ruined everything. Once he starts jumping to his right I go and push the canister into a better position.
3. He jumps backwards away from me instead of down towards me, so I moved the canister again to be closer to the corner he lands around. That's because although he can initiate a jump attack from there he'll rub against the wall and can cause his position to sort of bug out and he may not land where you want.
4. At 18 seconds you can hear my tail missed the canister (somehow), but my intent was to set the canister off a bit sooner than I ended up doing. If I had the canister in a better position (not getting stuck on that corner at the beginning and needing to pause to maintain line of sight) this wouldn't have been an issue since I could have poked it from a range with both of us stationary.
5. Also because I was delayed by the canister a few times I barely managed to get the block in for his jump attack just in time. Unfortunately because I wasn't in an ideal position by the canister and was moving my counter attack didn't knock him down right next to the canister like I wanted, but he was still near enough to take decent damage.
6. Upon knocking him down I backed off to avoid taking huge damage from the explosion. This is what would allow you to survive this strat at nearly any health since you could sit back and take zero damage if you so chose to. I actually ended up moving back in at the end because I figured we were so far from the explosion that I could survive it which I did.
7. Keep track of the Elite Predator's health so you don't throw any extra swipes than needed since you can grab him once he's low enough and his health turns orange. Since the explosion damage he takes has the potential to vary wildly due to a ton of factors you shouldn't just attack a certain number of times or simply mash the key since you'll probably end up throwing and extra light attack or two for no reason.

Here's a clip that's much more in control: https://streamable.com/axnl3 Next step is going to be trying to get average times for left click spam, right click spam, and canister explosions to see if it's really worth anything as the strat develops more.