Runes of Magic US / AU

This Event appers to have two ...arguments?.. associated with it. "arg1" is theunitname, "player" "target" etc. But I'm not sure what the arg2 number represents. I've got values from 0 to 100, 75, 64, 11598, etc....Can't seem to find any correlation between the change in buffs and arg2.


I'm trying to work on an addon to count the number of times a particular buff is received. I have a simple frame registered to the UNIT_BUFF_CHANGED event, and when arg1 is "player", I scan through player buffs to increment a counter. The problem is that this event fires multiple times, and for a single count, I end up with a counter value of 16+.

I'm currently playing with UnitBuffLeftTime > X to try to get only a single count for a given event. There's a limitation to this though....if an unrelated buff gets applied/refreshed while time > X, you still get multiple counts.

But I was hoping there was a simpler way, maybe through some global variable associated with the UNIT_BUFF_CHANGED event (like how _source and _target are related to COMBATMETER_DAMAGE event).


EDIT: It occurred to me that I can just use the combat log message event rather than going through the buff bar, but question about buff-related global vars still remains.

If I was asking about the festival (aka event) I would not have placed this thread in the "AddOns, UI & questins & issues" section of the forums. As such, if you don't understand a thread in this section of the forums, your comments of confusion only clutter them unnecessarily (as does this comment but I feel it had to be said).

So I've started investigating this event, in an attempt to be able to use it in an addon I'm making. I'm getting some strange results, so I'm wondering anyone out there is able to help.

The event fires multiple times for a single buff or debuff. I need to find some way to run code only 1 time when a debuff is applied (right now I get chat window spam messages when I receive a debuff).


I've been testing in a duel against a warlock/mage using soul pain (which applies a 24s and a 20s debuff), and just manually printing arg1 arg2 arg3 when the event fires. It fires a few times upon use of soul pain, and 1 time when the 20s debuff expires (but not when the 24s debuff expires).

arg1 is always the buff / debuff name

arg2
sometimes returns nil, but sometimes returns a number. Even with the same debuff, the number changes when I close, then open a new client. This suggests it is an address or object ID, but I'm unsure how to do anything with this. It also doesn't really answer why it is nil sometimes, and a number other times.


Strange event...

The purpose is less important than the event itself. Essentially I want to understand how it works from a programming perspective, to better ultilise it in code.

I have only few courses of basic programming, hoping someone with more knowledge of programming in general, and runes of magic coding, might be able to assist. Essentially there's more to the event than what is listed on the wiki, and I want assistance in deciphering the other arguments it returns when it fires.