Methods, systems, and devices are described for effective deployment of coverage enhancements in applications involving carrier aggregation or reception-limited devices, or both. Different categories of user equipment (UE) may be configured to receive simultaneous broadcasts and unicasts differently according physical limitations of each category of UE. Several component carriers may be utilized, and each may employ the same or different coverage enhancement techniques. Differences in coverage enhancement techniques may be accounted for with numbers and timing of hybrid automatic repeat request (HARM) processes, soft buffer partitioning, channel bundling, and/or transmission prioritization. UEs may determine to cease transmission of one or more component carriers based on different priorities assigned to the component carriers.