[Bug] Player Buff Tray Does Not Sort Properly

[eartharioch]

I'm kind of surprised I couldn't find any other threads on this, since it was one of the announced features of 3.0. One of my biggest difficulties with rotations is the chaotic buff order (that and many of the buffs looking similar). So I was looking forward to this, and have tried out all of the options, and haven't found one that works. In order to nail down [part of] what's wrong, I did a bit of testing (and sent in a bug report, although due to the character limitation, I couldn't give as many examples as I do here).

 

FYI, my goal is to have the semi-permanent buffs (stims, sprint, tank charge, XP boost, class buffs) at the bottom and the more dynamic (combat) buffs on top. IMO, Apply Time is the only sort order I would expect to work, since Time Remaining and Total Duration would seem to have obvious problems with buffs with indefinite duration. The tooltip for Apply Time says it doesn't take 0 Duration Buffs into account, but I don't know what constitutes a 0 Duration Buff, although I suspect that is the bug.

 

Anyway, for my controlled test, I used my Assassin, and set the row width to 6, sort left, sort up, sort by Apply Time, and not to sort personal affects first.

 

Experiment 1:

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1) Clear Buffs

2) Activate Class Buffs (all four appear as expected) [1,1] - [1,4]

3) Apply Sprint; it appears after the Class Buffs (as expected) [1,5]

4) Apply Dark Charge; it appears after Sprint, as expected. [1,6]

5) Apply Stealth; it takes Dark Charge's place at the end of the bottom row ([1,6]) and Dark Charge starts a second (higher row) -- [2,1]. I expected Dark Charge to remain in place and Stealth to start the new row.

 

The fun continues:

6) Exit Stealth; Dark Protection appears to the right of my class buffs ([1,5]), replacing Sprint, and Sprint moves to where Dark Charge was ([2,1]), and Dark Charge returns to [1,6].

 

And more fun:

7) When Dark Protection ends, Sprint replaces it (returning to its original place at [1,5]). Dark Charge remains at [1,6].

 

Experiment 2

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1) Clear all buffs

2) Activate Dark Charge; it appears in [1,1]

3) Activate Sprint; it appears after Dark Charge at [1,2] as expected

4 Activate Class Buffs; they appear at the beginning of the row ([1,1]-[1,4]), bumping Dark Charge to [1,5] and Sprint to [1,6]. Obviously, I expected the buff applied later to appear after the ones applied earlier.

 

Experiment 3

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1) Clear all buffs

2) Activate Sprint; it appears at [1,1] as expected.

3) Activate Dark Charge; it replaces Sprint (at [1,1]) and Sprint gets bumped to [1,2].

 

I'm "guesing" this unexpected/unappreciated behavior has to due with the "0 Duration" exception, and I'm not surprised that devs would use 0 to mean indefinite and *not* actually 0, but the problem is that Sprint, Dark Charge, and Stealth are all "indefinite" buffs, all instants, and none of them have any sort of Duration mentioned, but they aren't being treated consistently.

 

Also, while the tooltip excludes "0 Duration effects", there is no indication of what that means exactly. It appears to mean that they always appear "near" the end of the list, but (IMO) the best solution would be to just sort them like everything else and let the players activate buffs in the desired order.

 

Furthermore, while I didn't test mounts/sprint exhaustively, but they exhibit similar bad behavior (sorting into the middle).

 

To be honest, the best (from a player perspective) solution would be to make a "fixed" frame that would have have long-term buffs (like Class Buffs, CM Boosts, Sprint, mount, pets, etc.) and a "dynamic" frame that would hold the usual stuff. Probably the easiest way to do it would be to have the buffs that persist through logout and login in the fixed frame and the other ones in the dynamic frame (so, more like separate nonvolatile and volatile frames).

[eartharioch]

As I've been testing, I've encountered a number of cases I can't reliably repeat, including:

 

o Procs sometimes appear in between class buffs, even though all class buffs are applied at the same time (I get all four when I activate mine). I have seen this with Harnessed Darkness and Lightning Reflexes, and I have seen them appear normally (not in the middle of class buffs) as well.

 

o Procs sometimes appear at in the lower left, ahead of the class buffs (I've seen Lightning Reflexes do this).