Stacking Debuffs

A consistent concept in arenas has been the idea of using stacked debuffs to frustrate dispels. By "covering" a Polymorph with Winter's Chills or "protecting" a Wound Poison with a stack of Deadly, the idea is that all these junk debuffs make dispelling the important debuff more difficult.

Sadly, this doesn't exactly work the way people think it does.

It works in the sense that by having Winter's Chilll (or whatever) on the target, the chance of getting that CC effect is lower, but the amount of stacks is irrelevant. Dispel targets debuff by slot not by a total count of debuffs. If you have polymorph and 5 WC's up on a target, their odds of dispelling the poly are 1/2 not 1/6. (On a single dispel) The same holds true for poison cleansing, etc.

Functionally, this perhaps makes no difference. The "correct" way to cover a polymorph doesn't change. You either rank 1 frostbolt, rank 4 frostbolt, or CoC before polying to get 3 debuffs on the target. The oft heard complaint that a frost mage + dot class is a pain because "WC stacks make it impossible to get the dots" (think 4dps 5s) is really probably due to the fact that WC is just being reapplied constantly.

For priest dispel, stacking has some slight marginal benefit in that the priest might get 2 WCs instead of 1 WC and something else.

Unrelatedly, Hellfire does break all CCs that break on damage if timed correctly. The second tick of the Hellfire must coincide with the CC effect. (The first does nothing) Hellfire will not work on glyphed polies.

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