World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> The Debuff Limit and You

We changed how the game handles debuffs (ie negative state effects on targets) on creatures with Wrath of the Lich King. The old hard cap of 40 debuffs on a target no longer effectively exists. You can now apply way more debuffs to a target without them dropping off before their duration expires. The default WoW UI will not normally display all these debuffs, but they really are still there!

So the warlocks who claim stuff is dropping off, they can be put in with the group of locks that swears CoD Crits!

(well assuming this actually WORKS)

Nice, finally a post on this. I'd like them to define 'way more'. I'd also like to know if the API to check a debuff on a target works fine still even if its not in the 'first 40' that the WoW Frames show.

This must have changed w/ the actual Wrath go-live, because myself and others were still experiencing debuff dropoffs in 3.0 BC raiding.

I've noticed Drain Soul casts spontaneously end, which I attributed to it being knocked off by other debuffs. Is there another effect that would be causing this?

Since the change isn't client side (correct me if I'm wrong), I assume they are able to hot fix this without having to distribute a patch. The change was thus most likely implemented more recent.

In my experience Drain Soul dropping isn't because of the debuff limit, it happens even when there are much fewer than 40 debuffs. It never happens when soloing though, so (out of pure hypothesis) there is a hidden trigger from some raid buff or debuff that autocancels it similar to how Health Funnel can autocancel when a pet is full health.

Yeah, I had exactly that multiple times today and when it happened, my unitframes showed me debuffs to be 'capped' at 40, so I figured that's what happened. But if that actually works, what would cause those DS to just end out of nowhere?

Agreed "way more" is quite inaccurate. Hooray for affliction!

Unfortunately, they still need to fix shadow embrace before you can say so. It is still bugged so that only the first warlock to apply the debuff can benefit from it.

Now if they could only fix Shadow Embrace & Immolate.

Awesome! Glad to see this finally cleared up definitively =)

The Immolate comment, I'm assuming you've been having Immolate drop off as well? I've seen this happen quite a few times, and wasn't sure what was causing it, but it wouldn't suddenly disappear, it seemed as if WoW didn't realise I had just casted Immolate on the mob and hasn't applied it at all (I'm hit capped).

As posted in another thread here somewhere, apparently the immolate bug is caused by clipping the final dot tick - re-apply immolate before the final dot tick and it won't register as having been cast.

Are you sure the immolate not applying isn't a case of "More powerful spell is already in effect" from previous procced/trinketed casts? I haven't seen any immolate dropping / failure to apply besides the aforementioned.

No, it successfully completes its cast but is never applied to the boss. It probably has to do with what was mentioned above.

Has someone had the immolate bug without the immolate glyph?

Or maybe it is something like:
- (Client Side) Cast Immolate: Immolate is already present, just refresh it
~Lag~
- (Server Side) Immolate tic -> That was the last tick, remove the debuff
- (Server Side) Refresh immolate -> Debuff not present, do nothing

I doubt it, because I don't think it does the DD part either.

Anyone encountered any Corruption-problems? Many times I notice that Corruption falls off (or at least my timer says so) when it has 2-3 seconds left, which can be very annoying if you just sent a Haunt on it's way.

This is normal behavior due to how EA refreshes corruption. When it gets refreshed, it resets the timers but not the ticks. So, if your corruption ticks when it has 2.8 seconds left, it will truncate the dot and it will fall off.

The Shadow Embrace issue isn't likely to get fixed soon. They discussed it regarding Ebon Plaguebringer:

Of course with Shadow Embrace they could just make it a self buff, but until that happens, the problem will remain. I suspect their answer for warlocks would be much the same - if your dps suffers too much, respec.

I don't think they'll be turning SE into a self-buff either, since they're trying to give it more pvp usefulness with the HoT reduction. :|