Burning Aura

What it is

Burning Aura is a world-roaming elite affix that surrounds the host enemy with a passive flame zone. Any time the player’s ship is inside the aura radius, the host applies continuous damage-per-second to the ship. The host itself is unchanged — no extra HP, no damage filter, no death effect — the affix is pure proximity pressure that punishes the player for sitting on the elite.

Identity

Field	Value
Affix id	burning_aura
Category	world-roaming elite
Priority	60
Hooks	onUpdate
Roll pool	world-roaming elite pool (rolls on elite-pack leaders at spawn)
Halo palette entry	yes (orange-red)
Boss-only	no

The affix sits in the mid-band of priority. It does not register a damage filter, so its priority only affects log ordering relative to other onUpdate hooks; it never short-circuits another affix’s filter chain.

What it does

On every frame the affix runs one onUpdate tick on its host:

1. Emits flame-spark particles around the host at roughly five particles per second, tinted orange-red from the affix palette.
2. Checks the squared distance from host to the player ship. If the ship is outside the aura radius, the tick ends.
3. If the ship is inside the radius, applies dps × dt damage to the player through the affix damage adapter, tagged with the affix-source string for telemetry.

Damage is continuous and frame-scaled — there is no per-tick cooldown, no internal accumulator, and no minimum-damage floor. Stepping into the aura for a single frame applies one frame’s worth of damage; staying inside for one second applies the full dps value.

Per-tier values

The affix carries two tunables, read from the per-host affix-instance state. If a roster entry omits a key, the default constant from the affix palette is used.

State key	Default	Unit
radius	200	world pixels
dps	6	hit-points per second

Particle emission is hard-coded to roughly five sparks per second (one spark every 0.2 s of accumulated frame time). Spark spawn radius is the host’s collision radius scaled to 0.6×–1.2× per spark, with random angle. Sparks rise at 30–50 pixels per second, live 0.4–0.6 seconds, and use the orange-red palette entry shared with the host’s halo.

How it interacts

• Halo: the affix’s palette entry feeds the enemy-orbit halo, so any host wearing Burning Aura is visibly tinted orange-red even when the player is outside the aura.
• Damage adapter: damage is applied through the late-bound damage-player adapter wired at engine boot. The adapter takes the player ship, amount, game state, optional hit angle, optional HP-damage multiplier, and a source tag; Burning Aura passes no angle and no multiplier, only the source tag.
• Telemetry: each damaging tick emits an affix-proc telemetry phase carrying the configured dps as its value. Out-of-radius ticks emit no telemetry.
• Volatile Crystal synergy: the Volatile Crystal prop (dropped by volatile elites and by reflective_burst elites on death) has a 25 percent chance on break to spawn a one-shot burning-aura proximity tick around the next hit. This is the affix’s name reused as a tag for that prop effect, not a fresh affix instance — the same flame-zone visual and damage shape, fired once instead of continuously.
• Boss affixes: Burning Aura is in the world-roaming pool only, so it never composes with boss-flavored affixes (shielded, gated, periodic-invuln, reflective, armored). It can stack with any other world-roaming affix on the same elite when the roll pool grants more than one.
• Player ship: damage is dealt to the singleton shared player ship; the affix does not target friendly minions or other entities.

EXTRACT-CANDIDATE

• The proximity-tick damage shape (radius gate plus dps × dt per frame, no cooldown, no floor) is reused by the Volatile Crystal break and is a candidate for the flame-zones concept page rather than being redocumented per consumer.
• The particle emission cadence (five sparks per second, host-radius spawn ring, palette-tinted) is shared with other VFX-emitting onUpdate affixes and may belong in a shared “affix particle emission” concept page.
• The orange-red palette entry doubles as the enemy halo color and the spark color; this dual-purpose-per-palette-entry rule is a global affix-VFX convention and is canonical to the affixes overview page.