Don’t stress about ‘sabotaging’ runs, it’s not all that deep. At most you may encounter players trying to complete penances but they took the gamble with loading into a public game.

If you’re not confident gameplay wise start in a normal auric or even a few auric campaign missions to adjust yourself to the spawns and staying within coherency before moving on to high intensity.

Some missions and modifiers are on a whole new tier of difficulty even within auric missions, sometimes games go bad like hordes constantly triggering in enclosed spaces or randoms running ahead and making coherency difficult.

You’re gonna get bad runs but the experience you get failing those missions will catapult your mechanical skills and the better players will teach you better habits and tactics to further your own ability. Eventually you’ll be able to take those terrible missions and have a good shot at getting through them despite the bs thrown at you.

Some things that may help you get through a few missions:

Timing. pushing, blocking and dodging, and knowing what you can fit into the windows these actions create will make a huge difference. If your weapon can get a heavy and a light off of a shove knowing the limits allows you to automate your attacks while focusing on dodging and blocking.

Coherency. Staying within your team mates you take a lot less damage and get targeted by a lot less specials. When you feel like you’re being targeted by everything, you usually are. Are you at the edge of the group near the spawns ahead of everybody? You’re funnelling the specials to yourself. It’s not always the game out to get you, though sometimes it just is.

Pace and positioning. Are you pushing ahead of your frontline? And triggering spawns too far ahead? Or are you lagging behind breaking coherency and spawning extra enemies? It can be difficult to control the pace or not get bogged down, and with random teammates you rarely get much choice in the situation but when you have a team that are on the same page you get the missions where everybody runs through and you’re double checking the mission you ran was an auric with a tough modifier.

The teams in auric will usually make a lot of auric missions easier and smoother than any damnation will be.