A lot of my spells and things are defined by status effects that harm accuracy, armor rating, etc. Unfortunately, they seem like they're not doing anything because they don't do damage. I want to notify the player, but unfortunately when I try this the log is horribly behind.

Maybe there is another way to implement a "log" but I can't think of it.

Well, there's debug.trace and debug.messagebox...

I understand how faster notifications would be more useful though.

You can use messages in a similar way as notifications. Not sure though if it's faster. Didn't try it.