Developers investigating Demonic Pact/Divine Spirit bug

A bug that's been standing since patch 3.0 is now officially being looked into.

The bug's rare, but it does happen. It can prevent demonic pact from proccing over top of Prayer of Spirit, and in some cases even causes pet crits to reapply Prayer of Spirit instead of Demonic Pact. It can cause inconvenience or significant impairment for a raid if it's not caught quickly. Technical nerd jargon after the break.


There's two theories on exactly what causes the bug. One is that a typo in code exists causing their similar aura ID's to overlap. Prayer of Spirit is 48074, Demonic Pact is 48090.

If those two don't look similar to you, you don't think like a computer. In hexadecimal, those are BBCA and BBDA. The C and D are binary 1100 and 1101, meaning a one bit error could conceivably be responsible for the bug. When you hear people say computer's think in binary, they're only half right - base 16 is actually much more representative of how computers work, as opcodes process bits in blocks equal to multiples of 4, with 4 bits being one digit in hexadecimal.

The second theory is that Prayer of Spirit does three things in game data. It increases your spirit, but it also increases your spell damage and spell healing by 0. These are relics from when Discipline had a talent to add a spellpower bonus to Prayer of Spirit, they no longer actually do anything. Those two things are, however, the same two aura effects Demonic Pact applies, though it applies them in greater quantities than 0.