The debuff limit was originally a technical limitation from 2004, not a deliberate game design choice. Even Blizzard eventually increased it from 8 to 16 slots and later removed it entirely in Burning Crusade once server technology improved.
It unnecessarily punishes certain classes and specs, particularly:
Warlocks who want to use Corruption and Immolate
Shadow Priests
Hybrid classes and DOT-based specs
Healers who sometimes can’t use their main healing spells
The game balance argument against removing it doesn’t hold up because:
Raids are already heavily optimized with warrior stacking and world buffs
A single world buff provides more power than removing the debuff limit would
The limit has already been removed in hardcore servers without significant balance issues
Most raids are already being cleared very quickly (mentioned 50-second kills)
The limit really only impacts raiding, not other aspects of the game like:
Leveling
Dungeons
PvP
General gameplay
Removing it would increase build diversity and make the game more enjoyable by:
Allowing more class variety in raids
Letting players use their full ability toolkit
Reducing the need for complex debuff coordination
Making certain specs more viable without hurting overall game balance
The consensus seems to be that keeping this technical limitation in 2025+ serves no beneficial purpose and only restricts player options unnecessarily.
can you express the other side of the argument too? for example, should bosses be re-tuned to compensate for the increased debuff count? They surely aren’t at the intended difficulty currently…
classic feels more like Wrath raiding than Vanilla raiding.
The additional DPS from removing the debuff limit would be minimal compared to existing factors. As mentioned in the discussion, even allowing warlocks to use Corruption/Immolate provides less power than a single world buff or stacking warriors.
are we comparing normal to normal or normal vanilla with heroic wotlk? because the ecosystem becomes so different when there’s multiple difficulties that anyone can argue any viewpoint at the same time.
for example: Anduin was the most difficult normal mode since M’uru.
also, ToC normal was naxx normal difficulty before anubarak.
There isn’t a single class that sees a big enough DPS boost that you would even consider swapping a warrior out for them. In fact if you look at the logs on a server with the limits and one without the limits, the damage really doesn’t change markedly, so bosses would not need additional balancing. For example a hunter will still have poor dps with or without serpent sting a few more DPS isn’t going to make people suddenly want to bring hunters.
Not really, the only point that he somewhat misses is that it allows more class variety in raids, which it really doesn’t since it doesn’t change the meta, it just makes a fe classes slightly less bad. The rest of the points are pretty spot on though.
It just doesn’t change that much, and this isn’t going to fix classes or change the balance much, that wont happen till TBC, but for a few classes the fact that they can use their abilities even if they don’t do much is nice, its also good that a warrior/mage won’t see their DPS plummet because someone hit an ability that knocks a more important ability off the boss.
True we should ask for pre-nerf raids back and we should ask for them to be buffed based on the massive power factor increases provided by 1.10+ gear itemized gear and class updates that also trivialized the content further.
Additionally we should request WCL only ranks clean parses that use no world buffs.
Who cares, the bosses are target dummies but if you buff them to do more than stand there and die over 20 seconds the classic Andy’s will cry because now it’s too hard.