What causes an Unreal damage-over-time effect whose duration does not refresh on reapply?

Each reapplication either creates a fresh independent effect or overwrites the old one, so stacks and remaining duration are not merged according to the intended refresh rule.

How do I catch this when it only happens for some players?

Capture it automatically from the player's device with the full stack trace, the device and OS, the build, and a breadcrumb trail of what they did. That turns a vague complaint into a specific, reproducible issue you can fix without owning the hardware it happens on.

How to Fix Damage-Over-Time Stacks Not Refreshing Duration in Unreal

Quick answer: On reapply, find the existing effect on the target, refresh its remaining duration to full, and increment the stack count up to a cap instead of spawning a duplicate.

When refreshing a poison resets its ticks or stacking adds uncontrolled copies, the reapply logic is wrong. Merging into the existing instance fixes both. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Find the existing effect first

Before applying, check whether the target already has this DoT. If so, operate on that instance rather than adding a new one.

2. Refresh duration and stacks

Set the existing effect's remaining time back to its full duration and increment its stack count up to MaxStacks, so reapplying extends and intensifies it.

3. Scale tick damage by stacks

Compute per-tick damage as BaseTick * StackCount so each refresh that adds a stack also raises the damage, consistent with the displayed stack number.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every Unreal Engine error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.

Ship the fix, watch the signature disappear from the next build. That's how you know it's really gone.