In two recent papers the authors have studied conditions on the relaxation parameters in order to guarantee the stability or instability of solutions for the Taylor approximations to dual-phase-lag and three-phase-lag heat conduction equations. However, for several limit cases relating to the parameters the kind of stability was unclear. Here we analyze these limit cases and clarify whether we can expect exponential or slow decay for the solutions. Moreover, rather general well-posedness results for three-phase-lag models are presented. Finally, the exponential stability expected by spectral analysis is rigorously proved exemplarily.