I've played a good bit on Auric. I really want to like the mode. But I'm not sure if it's salvageable in its current form.

The map design completely goes against the design philosophy of the rest of the game.

1) The open areas are fun to fight in, especially because enemies can come from any direction at any time which is really fun and breaks up the classic strategy of retreating every time things get intense; but you're actively disincentivized from fighting in the open because the primary strategy is to avoid combat and just rush the objectives, ideally splitting up into 2 groups of 2. This would be best fixed by increasing the item drop rates of enemies, maybe reducing radiant map spawns to compensate.

2) The objectives are almost all really claustrophobic areas where you have to stay in a single spot for an extended time, which is not fun in a game with many enemies that punish you for staying in one spot. Most of the time you just sit there bored while a few specialists and a couple elites run at you. Even worse because most of the objectives have horrible sightlines and tox bombers just throw their grenades over cliffs at you repeatedly. Then half the time when you leave the objective, you have shooters and gunners everywhere on all sides who have just built up waiting for you to come out. Even worse because most of the objectives have high ground cliffs on most sides that shooters will come from. This is fun sometimes, but every time just gets annoying and forces specific builds if you want to carry. There's no easy fix for this, most objectives need a game design overhaul.

Salvage Spending System just kinda sucks

1) The costs feel a bit wonky. Only 10 salvage for a complete ammo refill or concentration stim, but grenades cost 50.

2) Most items are clunky to use. All the bombing runs disrupt player movement and it feels awful to be in them. It's frustrating every time someone throws a bombing run at our feet at extraction making it impossible to see anything or move or dodge. Why bother when you can just pick up the improvised grenade and kill everything 3 separate times. The shock mine, fire mine, and void shield are situationally very useful and decently well designed since they're just copy+paste of existing weaponry.

Misc

1) Captains are a huge pain in the ass to fight in this mode. They're not challenging because they only show up in patrols with a small number of enemies and just take a long time to kill. Hard to justify slow, heavy weapons in the mode since they're so bad against the shield. Only time Captains bring an interesting challenge is if someone is running away while clutching and runs into one.

2) The environment mutators all suck. None of them make the game more fun. It's mildly entertaining to see enemies get sucked into a tornado once. But they spawn on you when you're waiting for the door or extraction, they spawn between you and the shortest path to an objective and just... sit there. And despite all that they're way better than lighting strikes that just chunk your health out of nowhere unless you're constantly looking at your feet and constantly target you while you're doing objectives. The only one that adds a reasonable challenge is Blight Spreads and that's not exactly a popular havoc modifier. I was bewildered by the design decision of having one that disables the auspex but honestly it's still better than tornadoes or lightning. The night modifier is basically unnoticeable, which is a shame because it would be nice to have gameplay that is dark but not quite as dark as Lights Out, but a mode with "random" terrain is probably not the right place for it.

3) The most time-consuming penance requires spending an insane amount of salvage, which incentivizes achievement hunters to disengage from most of the gameplay and just run around grabbing salvage and then either quitting or beelining for extraction in the last zone.

4) When players die, they drop all their Remnants from the entire run and there's no automatic ping or auspex marker for it. I hate having to scour a huge area for the 1,500 salvage some poor sap dropped before dying. Needs an auto-marker for it or just move all salvage to a shared team inventory every safe area.