TI14 Qualifiers: Game Breaking QoP Glitch Explained

A bizarre, game breaking interaction occurred in the International 2025 (TI14) Chinese regional qualifiers today, with Yakult Brothers’ mid laner Zhou “Emo” Yi being the victim of one of the weirdest glitches I’ve seen in all my years covering professional Dota 2. While playing Queen of Pain in game 2 of their series against Xtreme Gaming, Emo found himself respawning in his team’s fountain stuck permanently at 1 health.

The problem persisted even through fountain healing, and through dropping stat-increasing items like Emo’s Aghanim’s Scepter and Black King Bar. The game was paused by PGL tournament admins after the glitch occurred, and the decision was made to roll the game state back to about a minute before things went awry.

Unfortunately for Yakult Brothers, they ended up losing the game anyway, and the series thereafter. This result sends them to the lower bracket of the Chinese regional qualifiers, where they await the winner of the match between Excel Esports and Tearlaments.

So, what the heck happened?

According to users on the Dota 2 subreddit, this glitch was caused by a broken interaction between Sonic Wave (R), Queen of Pain’s Succubus innate ability and her Masochist facet, enemies with extremely high status resistance, and an integer overflow bug that occurs when healing an extremely large amount of health in one server tick.

Because status resistance shortens the time that debuffs last when applied, the debuff from Sonic Wave (the knockback effect) is applied and removed on the same server tick if it hits a target with a sufficient amount of status resistance. To compensate for this, and to ensure that spells that deal damage in a similar manner still dole out their full damage even through status resistance, Sonic Wave is programmed to deal more damage per tick if the knockback duration is shorter than normal.

In Emo’s case, casting Sonic Wave onto Lin “Xxs” Jing’s Brewmaster, which had Aeon Disk equipped and Void Stance active through Drunken Brawler (R), dealt a practically infinite amount of damage to Xxs because of the aforementioned server tick shenanigans. The exact reason that this happens is because Sonic Wave deals damage in 0.1 second intervals 14 times throughout the animation, which means that the damage per tick skyrockets when the spell encounters a high enough amount of status resistance.

The equally massive healing from Succubus that followed as a result was cancelled out by the self damage from Masochist, which basically killed him instantly because of the skyrocketing damage mentioned above. All of this combined to cause the integer overflow, making Emo’s health value roll over to one point out of more than 3,000 maximum health upon respawning. The prevailing theory by the subreddit is that the actual number ended up being somewhere around 2 million, though this is only conjecture at this point.

Known quantity

Apparently, this bug had already been known for quite some time, as another user on the subreddit had actually posted about a similar scenario three months ago. In their case, the Queen of Pain in the example that they provided used Sonic Wave on a Spirit Breaker that had close to 100 percent status resistance, thanks to Aeon Disk, Bulldoze (W), and presumably a Sange and Yasha on top (unsure as it was not visible in the clip).

The Queen of Pain melted instantly thanks to Masochist as explained earlier. The player then bought back shortly after death, only to find themselves stuck at 1 out of 3,942 HP. They even bought a Heart of Tarrasque to try and shore up their health, but to no avail. Their maximum health did increase as a result, but their current HP stayed low thanks to the bug.

The issue was posted on the Dota 2 GitHub page on March 1st this year, but did not get a single comment until the glitch happened in an official professional match. It’s infuriating that this hasn’t been looked at in the months that the GitHub post has been up, and that Yakult Brothers might have had to been the sacrificial lambs just so that Valve can finally fix this issue.

They did end up losing the game anyway, so maybe it’s too hasty to say that it decided the outcome of a closed qualifier match. What I can say with some certainty, though, is that having to deal with that under the immense pressure of trying to qualify for The International probably affected Emo’s mental state heading into the third and final game of the series.

It’s kind of laughable that Patch 7.39, which came out just three weeks ago, was touted by Valve as a “spring cleaning” update — but such an egregious glitch was missed entirely by the dev team despite it being known for a few months at that point. Hopefully we see a hotfix before the day ends.