I believe he's saying the debuff limit is an outmoded concept.

I think he's asking why there is a debuff limit in the first place. My guess is that it's due to memory constraints.

Okay obviously it can't be infinite but why not like 64 or something that will never be a concern for a raid anyway, is what I'm saying.

I wonder if this is the explanation for Hydross' occasional mega-hit - the 19.5k variety when you're absolutely sure you have all the proper debuffs up and he should only be hitting for a max 16k. (250% strat)

Knocking improved demo off him could explain this I think.

When this was discussed ages ago when the limit was raised to 40 there were a couple of things that remember people said:

1) It's not just storing 40 debuffs its iterating them to check whether you have overlapping ones or whether one has to knock of another. This is non trivial to do multiple times a second.

2) The servers could only handle it by being upgraded and having only 25 people in the raids.

3) Weird statement by CM's saying that debuff management was part of the skill in doing raids.

Personally I think 40 is a good enough number. For the average raid you don't even run into it. When you have an oversupply of spriests and affliction warlocks you start getting issues but then you just tone things down and your fine. It is nothing like the old 16 debuffs for 14 essential debuffs situation we used to have so I doubt they will bother stressing their hardware anymore by upping it for a while.

I'm happy with the debuff slot limitation. While there are plenty of ways of dealing with varying numbers of debuffs programmatically (throw more hardware at it!), it serves as an artificial limitation on the number of debuffing classes with which you can stack a raid. No one wants a raid of 15 warlocks, 5 shadow priests, 3 pallies and a tank being optimal for any fight.

However, they should reinstate debuff prioritization. I'm sick of having to redo CoW or CoS multiple times in a fight. Important debuffs should stay up first (Sunder, curses sans Doom and Agony, Fire Vuln, etc.), with damage buffs falling off in order of the DPS they cause. So, low DPS dots fall off before high DPS ones. This way, I can stop screaming at hunters.

Alternatively, they should enable some kind of combat message that lets you know one of your debuffs has fallen off so you can recast it.