Originally Posted by
Sparton_LOTB
To be clear, it was tested (I looked up the task in our tracking system to confirm), it just appears that it was confirmed to exist as described, and it was just missed that this effect (which shouldn't even have a duration other than "infinite") had an incorrectly set duration in one part of the effect.
Because it is a passive effect, the duration of it is not actually visible in-game, even though it, like basically every other gameplay effect, has a "Status Duration" field. In fact, every "effect" in combat (not just status effect, but thing like damage, healing, situational immunity, etc) all have over a dozen different fields, and any one of those set incorrectly can cause a bug of some kind which is a complete black box to you as players in the same way it's a black box to our testers. Because of the nature of how the data is constructed, it can't not have a duration set (the game would barf thinking the data was invalid), and because the data can also be in a place where the way something needs to function has nested effects (ie an effect pointing to another effect), it's sometimes necessary for a top-level effect to have a duration of 1 if it's sub-effects have the infinite duration. I couldn't even tell you the total amount of fields that need to be set exactly right to ensure that one Spiral Path passive functions currently, other than it being well over 100 different values (a top-level effect pointing to 3 sub-effects, with each sub-effect of those pointing to 2-3 other sub effects, with a minimum of 57 fields per effect/sub-effect).
Basically, that the bug we missed is one of hundreds of possible ways that one effect could have not functioned completely correctly. We cannot practically check every possible field's results (especially when it's not something our QA can even see directly) after accounting how many other tuning changes can go live in an update, and after accounting for all of the other feature and bug fix testing that needs to happen.
All that said, while we'll never be able to be perfect in catching stuff like this, we will review our testing process for tuning changes like this to better guard against it happening again.