The International 2025 region qualifiers are in full swing, especially in China. As exempted, Yakult Brothers, one of the favorites there, reached the UP Final, where it had to face Xtreme Gaming. Sadly for the team, a very annoying bug involving Queen of Pain ended up costing them the game.
Queen of Pain Glitch
We at Blix.gg have been covering Dota 2 for years, and we have never seen such a bug before. Basically, Zhou “Emo” Yi was playing QoP in the 2nd game of the series, and after dying, he found himself respawning in the opponent’s fountain. What’s more, he was permanently stuck at 1 health.
Emo and his team tried fixing the bug by removing some of the items that give stats, such as Aghs and BKB. PGL, the qualifiers’ organizers, paused the series to see what they could do, but even they were powerless. Instead of fixing it, the company made the decision to roll back the game to around 1 minute before these events took place.
The bad news for Emo and Yakult Brothers is that it did not help them win. The team lost the match at the International 2025 Qualifiers against Xtreme Gaming and will have to play in the Lower Bracket before meeting its opponent once again.
The Issue
Following the end of the series, there were several posts on Reddit about it. According to some users there, QoP’s big was caused by a broken interaction between Sonic Weave, the innate ability, the Masochist facet, the high status resistance and the bug that comes with healing a lot in one tick.
Because status resistance reduces how long debuffs last, the knockback from Sonic Wave can be applied and then removed within the same server tick if it hits a target with very high status resistance. To make sure the spell still deals its full damage in these cases, Sonic Wave is designed to increase its damage per tick when the knockback duration is shortened.
In Emo’s situation, he cast Sonic Wave on Lin “Xxs” Jing’s Brewmaster, who had both Aeon Disk active and Void Stance enabled through Drunken Brawler. This caused an unintended bug where Sonic Wave dealt an enormous amount of damage because of how the server calculated the interaction.
The massive healing that Emo received from the Succubus ability was then offset by the self-inflicted damage from Masochist, which ended up killing him instantly due to the inflated damage values. This combination triggered an integer overflow, causing Emo’s health to roll over to just 1 HP after respawning, despite having over 3,000 max HP.
The Bug is not Really New
Even though many people were shocked by this Dota 2 bug, it turned out that it’s not new. Queen of Pain melting instantly because Masochist has been around since March, but it did not get any attention until now. Hopefully, things will change soon and Valve will fix this issue because it’s definitely not something you want to have, especially after the Spring Cleaning update that was released a couple of weeks ago.
