Odd SPELL_ACTIVATION_OVERLAY_HIDE event behaviour recently?

[Raijin-earthen-ring]

While trying to work out why my simple spell overlay addon stopped working reliably I noticed that the eventlog is being spammed by many SPELL_ACTIVATION_OVERLAY_HIDE messages.

The addon in question shows an overlay when you have tidal wave stacks as a Resto Shaman. This addon has been working for a very long time at this point.

The only fixes I needed to make in BFA was to the texturepath id and a move to AuraUtil from the older method .

The issue is the display of the overlay is inconsistent, something is randomly hiding the overlay frame non stop. This is not caused by another addon as the base game seems to be constantly hiding the overlay frame.

Can I make any changes or is this a bug that Blizzard need to fix?

The addon is pasted below.

local f = CreateFrame("Frame")
local spellID = 53390 -- Tidal Waves
local texturePath = 592058
local scale = 1
local r,g,b = 60, 255, 200

local function overlayOn(tidalstacks)
if tidalstacks == 1 then
--print("1 tidal stack")
SpellActivationOverlay_ShowOverlay(SpellActivationOverlayFrame, spellID, texturePath, "LEFT", scale, r, g, b, false, false) -- left on
SpellActivationOverlay_ShowOverlay(SpellActivationOverlayFrame, spellID, "", "RIGHT", scale, 0, 0, 0, false, true)          -- right off

elseif tidalstacks == 2 then
--print("2 tidal stacks")
SpellActivationOverlay_ShowOverlay(SpellActivationOverlayFrame, spellID, texturePath, "LEFT", scale, r, g, b, false, false) -- left on
SpellActivationOverlay_ShowOverlay(SpellActivationOverlayFrame, spellID, texturePath, "RIGHT", scale, r, g, b, false, true) -- right on
end
end

local function overlayOff()
SpellActivationOverlay_HideOverlays(SpellActivationOverlayFrame, spellID) -- both off
end

f:SetScript("OnEvent", function(self, event, ...)
local _, _, count = AuraUtil.FindAuraByName("Tidal Waves", "player", "HELPFUL")
if count then
overlayOn(count)
else
overlayOff()
end
end)

f:RegisterUnitEvent("UNIT_AURA", "player")

–

## Title: Tidal Waves
## Interface: 80200
## Author: Me
## Version: 1.0
## Notes: Provides an alert when you have the the Tidal Waves Buff.

TidalWaves.lua

[Ketho-mirage-raceway]

Well uh I don’t know how it was different from before but UNIT_AURA just fires a lot

[Raijin-earthen-ring]

I know unit aura fires a lot I was counting on it to make the addon simple back in the day. I wrote it years ago and it’s worked fine until this week.

Stood outside of Ragefire Chasm, doing nothing at all, pretty much the only thing firing is SPELL_ACTIVATION_OVERLAY_HIDE. Constantly. On a base game.

I feel like something is bugged and the game shouldn’t be trying to hide the overlay non stop. I’ve not noticed Blizzards own overlays vanishing but they are affected in a different way.

Blizzards Spell Alerts often don’t animate. If you trace the events, Blizzards code seems to be triggering HIDE/SHOW’s back to back which means the throbbing animation loop doesn’t even start most of the time.

My fix, should anyone want to use my Tidal Waves addon there is to just add

f:RegisterUnitEvent("SPELL_ACTIVATION_OVERLAY_HIDE")
after
f:RegisterUnitEvent("UNIT_AURA", "player")

to the end of the above code.