Nah as I said thatâs literally almost every talent with a few exceptions that are all OP as a result. Talents, weapons and skills âscaling negativelyâ is effectively fundamentally why a higher difficulty is more difficult.
Example: Brainburst does a set amount of damage. It doesnât increase with difficulty. When you look at how killing power one hit has in an average encounter, youâre looking at a higher percentage on sedition than on auric. So it âscales negativelyâ and is weaker on auric. Generally considered balanced if a bit outshined by the less balanced options itâs pitted against.
Example 2: Shooting once with a single shot headhunter (forgot the mark). It doesnât increase damage with difficulty nor fire rate. When you look at how much killing power one hit has in an average encounter, youâre looking at a higher percentage on sedition on auric. So it âscales negativelyâ and is weaker on auric. Generally considered a decent balanced weapon.
Example 3: Weapon specialist. It provides you with one ranged crit. I wonât keep typing it out, but one crit has more killing power proportionally on lower difficulties since itâll let you oneshot a crusher more easily and thereâs only one crusher in an encounter. So inherently scales negatively too. Generally considered an extremely strong talent regardless, but partially because of an interaction with weapons with penetration which Iâll get to next.
Then there are things that DO scale positively with a difficulty increase and are as a rule considered busted op:
Example 1: Plasma gun. It hits an infinite amount of targets for full damage. That means on auric where there are 5-20 elites in a line often it actually has vastly increased killing power per shot in an encounter compared to sedition. This scales positively with the difficutly. This is an extremely OP weapon and everyone who plays this game a bunch agrees. Revolver scales positively for similar reasons, ever kill 5 shotgunners with one shot? Only on aurics.
Example 2: Psykinetics Aura/Tactical awareness/etc (the âCDR on elite/special killâ talents). These directly provide more CDR the more elites/specials are on screen, so obviously they scale positively with aurics. In effect these are completely busted and they let you spam vet yell 3 times in an encounter in auric, or let you venting shriek each time you hit 100% peril in one single encounter so long as elites are dying nearby. Completely OP in aurics as a result of scaling positively.
Example 3: old survivalist. Same as 2 really.
Incase you were comparing it to only auras, stuff like psykers 5% CDR inherently scale negatively too because having 5% more scriers gaze uptime isnât proportional to how many more enemies need killing with scriers gaze on in aurics. Another example would be zealots 10% toughness DR or hwatever it is. A crusher or mauler will oneshot your toughness on damnation regardless of that and thereâs a lot more crushers and maulers on auric. Meanwhile this can actually protect your HP bar more, proportionally, on sedition because itâs mostly just poxwalkers hitting you.
In other words itâs a very fundamental balance issue if something is STRONGER on aurics than on sedition. Thatâs what âscaling negativelyâ really means. Itâs a biased way to say âthis weapon kills more on sedition than on auricsâ or âthis skill has more benefits to player power on sedition than on auricsâ which as I said: Yeah, and thatâs how it should be. Thatâs where the difficulty comes from. If everything âscales positively with difficultyâ then aurics would be easier than sedition.
This is why I said weâre fundamentally starting to lose track of things here.
TL;DR Survivalist counteracts the teams ammo consumption less on aurics than on malice proportionally, and itâs good that way because increased ammo consumption and the resulting ammo econ is an inherent part of auric difficulty design. Pre nerf it was inversing the intended ammo econ on aurics and gave you more ammo to waste in an auric total than you would get on malice.
Itâs still 200% ammo restoration for the whole team per match on average btw. Thatâs the same amount of theoretical ammo restoration that you get from looking through boxes and finding the levels 2 ammo kits, and most people donât look for those to begin with. Imagine if zealot provided 2 med kits worth of healing to the team.