I'm curious how other guilds deal with the limitations of 40 debuff slots.

I raided during the days of 40 man raids with 8 debuff slots, and later 16, so going up to 40 debuff slots seemed like a massive increase. However, I quickly noticed that with all the new debuffs added in the expansion, plus the new raid niche shadow priests have found, 40 slots just isn't as much as it was 3 months ago. Shadow priests will use up 4 debuff slots, plus 2 more for misery and shadow weaving. A single affliction warlock can require as many as 8 slots at times, and on average each warlock in raid is going to be using up 4 debuff slots. Frost mages only require 1 additional slot, but each fire mage will use 2-3 debuff slots due to ignite, fireball dot damage, and potential for improved scorch or pyroblast. The main tank is going to be using 3 debuffs in the form of sunder armor, demoralizing shout, and thunderclap.

The 40 debuff limit is a very real factor, and has to be planned around. Looking at dps meters a raid leader might think "hey, lets just stack the raid with warlocks and shadow priests", but sadly with more than 5 total between the two classes debuffs are going to be seriously limited and raid dps will be going down by adding more of either class, not up.


So, I'm just curious what the major guilds have been doing for Gruul to prevent the debuff slots from being an issue. Do you just never bring more than 2 shadow priests? Do you make all your mages spec frost and all your warlocks spec destruction? Did you have no idea until now why sunders were dropping of the bosses?

Sunders can get bumped off? I thought they added the priority system to prevent that from happening?

There is a priority system, but I don't think sunder is that high on the list.

I know Curse of Shadows had a fairly high priority, yet I still saw it get knocked off when we tried gruul with 4 shadow priests.

We discovered in our Gruul attempts that the debuff priority system has either been removed or is bugging out. Curse of Shadows, Curse of the Elements, Sunder Armor, and anything else that we thought had priority was getting knocked off by anything. We raid Warlock and Shadow Priest heavy so this is a large issue for us. Warlocks don't use Immolate or Siphon Life unless they have to or some DoT classes have died.

Really upsetting to actually watch a fireball dot or deep wound knock off a CoE or Sunder. Funny at the same time, too!

Is there any way to know exactly how many debuffs are on the boss? A link to a mod would be much appreciated.

It might be an interesting exercise now to list the "standard" debuffs you would expect to always see on a 25 man raid boss. Not ones that are for individual DPS -- i.e. Thunderclap counts, Deep Wounds does not. Then you can get down to the amount of debuff slots that are available for the rest of your raid.

Warriors: Sunder Armor, Demoralizing Shout, Thunderclap
Mage: (Detect Magic?)
Priest: Misery, Shadoweaving
Druid: Faerie Fire
Hunter: Hunter's Mark, Scorpid Sting
Shaman: none
Paladin: JoW, JoL
Rogue: Deadly Poison
Warlock: CoE, CoS, CoR?

I'm counting 15 total in that list, Detect Magic would likely be one to go though so lets call it 14. That leaves 26 debuff slots for your raid. I'm not going to go into the personal debuffs for each class because I don't know all the classes intimately well. I'll just say that each shadow priest you bring will be adding 4 more debuffs (VT, VE, MF, SWP) so if you bring 2, you are down to 18 debuff slots for the remaining people.

Further, figuring out the debuff prioritizing system would be a good thing too. Having sunders knocked off is a Bad Thing(tm).

Removed, posted too late.

As far as I've been able to tell, most (if not all) of the debuff prioritization is gone. Curse of Shadow/Elements is being knocked off regularly once you hit the cap, and I can now knock my own Curse of Doom off with a Curse of Agony (which was not possible pre-2.0).

What? You can only have one curse up on a mob at a time. It has been that way for as long as I've been playing the game.

Previously, it would say there was a stronger debuff up on the slot, so if I tried to cast Curse of Agony it would just leave Doom up there. Now, Doom just goes away and Agony starts ticking.

Sure I use discord unit frames and have it show all 40 debuff slots. Its generally not too tough to find the icon you want out of that list. You can also sort debuff slots with some other unit frames... but I tend to not have problems sorting through the madness.