Before I answer this question, I feel it's worth quickly explaining how an ATAR is calculated:
Basically, at the end of year 12, your SACs and exam marks are combined to produce a "raw study score". Based on if that subject was perceived to be "harder" or "easier" (based on objectively comparing how highly people scored in that subject vs. other subjects they did), it will scale up or down. You may already be aware of this, hence the nature of your question. The way the ATAR is calculated is by adding those scaled scores together to get what's called an "aggregate", and then everybody is ordered by that aggregate to get an ATAR based on what percentile you lie in. (eg, if your aggregate is in the top 5% of aggregates, you'll get an ATAR of >=95.00) This means that what scores will get you what ATAR will vary by year - this is important, because it means nobody can ever *truly* predict your scores. Which sucks, but it is what it is.
So, does scaling affect what aggregate you can get? Well, last year, if you got 6 scaled study scores of 50 (the supposed "highest" study score you can get), you got an ATAR of 99.90. Yeah, not even the highest ATAR. This is because some subjects scale higher than 50 - usually languages and specialist maths. So if you're aiming for a 99.95, you HAVE to have a subject that scales over 50, however if you only want a 99.90, you can get a 99.90 with subjects that don't scale over 50. You're asking for a 98 - to which I have to say is yes: mathematically speaking, you 100% can get an ATAR of 98 even with subjects that don't scale up. But will not having scaling subjects make it more difficult?
I direct you to the scaling report. The way to read this is that the top numbers are your raw score, and the ones next to the subject are the scaled scores. You might notice scaling isn't a flat increase - eg, if you got a 25 in chemistry in 2019, it increased by 3 - and if you got a 30, it increased by 4. The most important part here is that scaling is largest the closest your score is to 30, and smallest the further away you move. This is by design. In fact, by the time you hit 45, most of these scaled scores have moved by 1 or 2 AT MOST. To get an ATAR of 98+ last year, you had to get scaled study scores of ~44 in all your subjects. Not an easy feat, sure - but the take home here is that even if you had subjects there were scaling up, they're not going to scale up by that much at all once you're scoring that high, and subjects that go down aren't going to change by much /either/. So no, I would say that scaling won't affect your chances much at all - it will be slightly harder without subjects that scale up, sure, but you will always score highest in subjects that you enjoy and are good at, so if you need to score that high anyway, it's worth sticking with those subjects that you know you'll get a good score in, instead of trying to rely on scaling to fix your ATAR for you.
EDIT: Beaten by Sine by a lot lmao, but I put in the technical details, so I'm leaving this here.
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