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?

While working on Gruul with a very heavy warlock raid, we told the warlocks not to use immolate (destruction warlocks would immo but not corr). We still ran into issues with dots falling off, and I would be very interested in a mod that displayed a number showing how many debuffs the boss had. If it was 38-40, I'd spend time nuking. When it dips, say 25 or so, I'd spend more time maintaining a dot cycle.

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!

Curses are too low on the priority list... that is the bottom line.

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.

I don't think it works, because I certainly never see it used or asked for.

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.

Incorrect, Deadly Poison takes up a debuff slot, and will be guaranteed if you have a mutilate rogue around. Even if you don't, you're likely to see it as it does better dps than instant and allows use of envenom.

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.

Scorpid Sting has worked on everything I've shot it at in Karazhan so far, with the exception of Curator since he's immune to poisons. Come to think of it, it's worked on everything everywhere, heroic bosses, DLK, etc etc. I can't recall specifically if it works on Gruul, having only been there once for a half dozen pulls and more concerned with learning to not shatter everyone, but I can't imagine that it doesn't.

I try to keep it up 100% of the time; fairly important debuff in my opinion (perhaps I'm just biased).

I think he was getting at raid debuffs, he didn't include the priest ones like VE, VT, SWP, MF or warrior ones like Deep Wounds or Mage Dots from Fireballs etc. That being said for every rogue depending on spec expect to see 1 stack of Deadly Poison (we each get one now) and possibly a rupture depending on spec and if you have a druid using Mangle.

I use Debuff Filter:

http://wow-en.curse-gaming.com/files...debuff-filter/

Not only can it filter the debuffs to only show the ones you care about, it will also display the total number of debuffs. The right-most screenshot on the addon page shows an example of the debuff count in action.

Thank you - this is exactly what I wanted.

What is really crazy, and hasn't happened in maybe 10 patches, is that I can cast CoA and have it land when I have an active Amp'd CoA on the target. Before I'd get "More powerful spell on target". It just shows there is no checks or priorities anymore. Really sad.

Just since we're being nit-picky, SW:P, VT, VE, and surprisingly enough Mind Flay all take debuff slots, and I can't imagine fighting a boss at my full capacity without having those up there on a regular basis.

Perhaps the priority system was done with level 60 debuffs in mind and it's an issue with various new lvl 70 debuffs? Meh. 8/

Scorpid Sting works on Gruul just fine afaik. And yeah, debuff slots are a huge issue. We usually have four Warlocks and two Shadowmages. Our locks are affliction/destro, so Cor/UA/1 Curse at least. One warlock has the -physical dmg thingy. Then the shadow bolt proc is usually up from one or the other.
The priests add VT, Sdw Pain, Mind Flay each, VE sometimes and then Misery & Weaving. The mages are mostly all fire, so Ignite and Fire Vulnerability plus Fireball dots. Sunder Armor, Mortal Strike and what not. I think a normal 25 player raid can easily fill 80 debuffs without much trouble.

Non-Fire Warlocks just can't use Immolate, even though it's usually a dps increase. Hunters better don't even think about Serpent Sting and while Judgments are quite powerful, in some fights I'd rather use the debuff slots for dps, at least JoL is not seeing much use for us.

As far as debuffs go, I use:

CoA/CoD or CoS/CoE
Corruption
Shadow Embrace
Siphon Life
Immolate
IMPSB Procs

I can if needed drop Immolate without it making much of a difference (Yet to test this some more, but as my +crit goes up and with the Eye of Quag I'm assuming I'll get more from SB spam than before due to crits and procs (imp. SB and the trinket)).
I can drop Siphon Life without a huge DPS difference though if I'm not with a Shadow Priest then I'll need heals due to lifetap from time to time.

Everything else if pretty much going to be up there, so I can cut back to 4 slots. One of which other locks may share (Imp. SB) and one which I will cut out for them - my Shadow Embrace will take priority.

So while a few locks will take up a few slots, especially full Affliction ones using everything they have, it is possible to cut out a few of the debuff slots without losing too much if you're running up against it.

So one with 4-5, and others with 3: Curses, Corruption, Imm/UA.

What else am I missing?