BFA GCD changes, good thing or bad thing

[Flaim]

If the gcd change feel bad it means the class design is trash to require that many cds in the first place to perform at an adequate level.

[thesmall001]

I agree with the problem and I agree with the solution. But they left the work half finished. Cooldowns should benefit for meaningfully interacting with gameplay; whether that be your rotation or your situational usage. Generic [I WIN] Buttons are not very exciting. Chaining together a bunch of CDs is great for when you hit a burst phase and want to concentrate on your rotation for a short window, but why not have that all in one button? Or, if it's so much fun, why not gate trinket activation (which they have) so you can create more moments like that (which they have)?

The problem is lots of classes just have two throughput CDs that aren't situational. So, naturally, you just want to chain them for the best outcome in one go. This is fine, as I said, but not as good as it can be. I also think the GCD can make some cooldowns more responsive and active. Rather than macro-ing every CD to an active ability, make the CD itself an active ability. That small amount of player agency is fair game, some will like it and some won't, and that's fair. I personally like the added flavour of CDs like Bloodrinker which is a channelled Blood/Tank ability that feels weird and funky because I'm a melee and I'm a Tank and I'm channelling? Craaaazy.

So, yeah, stream of thought post that wasn't laid out very well. But they just need to keep re-designing CDs until they all feel good to be on the GCD and then they need to keep a few they don't put on the GCD so everybody wins. And, oh look, they're making a new expansion with a bunch of class redesign and new talents to replace talents that were stolen from baseline and need to be folded back into the class. So I'm sure we'll see soon (tm).

[Caprias]

As fire mage it feels like playing with lag, absolutely terrible 0/10

This is sarcasm right?

Combustion is not on the gcd.

Yeah, they put it on gcd exactly so that you're supposed to think about it. Same with most offensive cds.
But I'm sure the battlecry+trinket+rampages that could global most people felt great.

It felt great in PvE though.. you shouldn't make so big changes on the behalf of "oh we need that to balance pvp", there are better solutions for that.

Also you didn't go into my point, yeah cooldown stacking which would simply be put into a cd1+cd2+trinket macro didn't make sense gameplay wise but it felt great.

If your cooldown is a 5-10 second buff and it does absolutely nothing the first 1.5~ seconds it just feels bad.

If they would have slightly reworked the cooldowns so they do at least something spectacular when you actually press the button the gcd complaints would have died down pretty fast i guarantee you, and this could also easily be balanced so that you can't stack too much burst.

[Zenfoldor]

Messes up the flow of the gameplay. Overall, very bad for PvE(I don't pvp so I don't know how it works there) imo.

I have a question. Why did they say they added all the new stuff to the gcd in BFA? What was their initial reasoning? Was it just PvP or what? I speculated it was to bring next wow xpak to ps5, but I haven't seen anything that makes me think this is happening, so what gives?

[MoanaLisa]

Slowing the game down a little bit for their aging population of non-twitch gamers wasn't a terrible idea. However, I don't think it meshed well with how abilities work in classes. I believe this is one of the primary things that affected how awkward some classes were to play during this expansion. Whether you consider that a GCD problem or a class tuning problem, I think it's a problem.