Non-WOW-player note: GCD is “Global Cooldown”, or the timer that ticks down before you’re allowed to do anything again after using an attack or a spell.
Recently on the Blizzard forums, several players were discussing GCD-capped gameplay. This highly debated design issue drew the following response from Blizzard’s Ghostcrawler:
Player Quote:
“GCD capped means you use every GCD. Whether it’s for a damaging ability, defensive ability, anything.This is a bad model for several reasons:
1. It greatly increases or decreases the value of expertise based on latency (There’s an actual spreadsheet on EJ that has this)
2. It leaves no room for thought or planning of rune usage.
3. You’re grossly penalized in dps if you manage to not get a few abilities off (say on a target switch, or hitting some lag) vs say a mutilate rogue who’s dps isn’t going to change whether they mutilate now or 2 seconds from now as long as their energy isn’t sitting near max.”
This is a good start, but there are other reasons we don’t like being GCD locked. It means you can never take even a moment to look around and notice the battlefield, notice who is in trouble, maybe shout something out on Vent. If you have a situational utility ability, or even are asked to do something unusual on a boss fight, you’re reluctant because you need those GCDs for more dps!!!!
(Usually when I say that, the response is “I can multitask!” But the reality doesn’t always match that boast. What we see instead if players complaining about e.g. movement fights because that means they can’t always get to step 6 of a 6 step damage rotation.)
Even more importantly, we also want design space for ourselves. When your spec is GCD locked, you have to start ignoring things like procs or free resources, because you can’t spend them without screwing up your rotation.
That said, we know that being GCD locked is a really subjective issue. Some players like hitting a button every 1.5 (or 1.0) seconds and feel like they are waiting around when that doesn’t happen. Fury warriors and the dps paladins who can’t necessarily hit a button every 1.5 sec now have found their Cataclysm versions of the classes to feel almost foreign… though we still think it will feel better in the long run. I worry a little about the overall health of our game if going 1.5 seconds without hitting a button bores you to tears. 🙁 Overall, I think everyone would have more fun if they focused more on beating the boss as a team and less on their individual contribution to that effort.
We also know that some players are just really intolerant of randomness. They make the logical leap from understanding that dealing with randomness is a challenge they need to overcome to campaigning for us to remove the randomness altogether. This is particularly true in PvP, which some players want to be more like a button masher fighting game and less like an RPG. Suffice to say that we think randomness is healthy and necessary as long as it doesn’t get out of control. Even though you may claim it’s the easiest thing in the world to hit that Pyroblast button when Hot Streak procs, we also know that dps can vary enormously even between relatively skilled and fantastically skilled players, and a great deal of that is using the right abilities at the right time.
Now with regard to DKs specifically, we think what is happening is that players are transfering characters in at 80 and ending up with 40% haste or whatever because of the way gear was converted on their character (no mastery, no armor pen). Once you get closer to 85, you won’t have that much haste. You may be GCD locked for short periods of time when the stars align and you get a bunch of procs at once, but you’ll also go streaks without those procs. This is still a world of difference from the DK on live, whose rotation collapses if they fail to get off a Plague Strike, or who can’t even take advantage of free runes or procs, or who just have to reroll if they experience the unfortunate but also inevitable lag that comes with playing an online game.
Now, if you’re one of those players who just hates gaps, then go ahead and stack a bunch of haste. You’ll have to go out of your way to do that though, and sacrifice some other stats to get there. For the DK that balances gear out, you shouldn’t be GCD locked for long periods of time.
Is GCD capping a bad mechanic or a valid style of gameplay? Will placing more value on the randomness of combat increase the intensity of combat/feel of the game at large? Are questions at the end of an article annoying?
You can find the original thread here.
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