The Ridiculous REAL Reason Blizzard Made GCD Changes: PVP Balance; Feedback and a Solution

[Hey guys, another big KingWalrax post here. I've spent some time since my last post trying to understand WHY Blizzard is making sweeping changes to how the GCD works, despite a major headwind of negative feedback. As much as we as a community can rag on them, they have reverted or made changes to parts of the game that the entire community has asked for. Sometimes slowly. Sometimes very slowly. But seeing them double-down recently and add MORE abilities to the GCD confused me. This post is the result of a week's work talking with the /r/wow community and digging and thinking on the topic -- please let me know what you guys think and if my solution makes sense or if I'm barking up the wrong tree here]“I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.”On March 23rd, Blizzard’s Game Director — Watcher — posted on the official forums in response to negative feedback on the GCD Changes that we’ve all become aware of. Link here.“Aside from setting the overall pacing of combat, abilities being on the global cooldown can create potentially interesting choices:”Right off the bat, we get a good insight: Watcher and Blizzard have come to believe that [Using An Ability], and then subsequently being locked out of [Using Another Ability] for [Some Period Of Time] can create interesting choices, where before there were none.In order to be interesting, there must be some motivation for the player, some scenario where each choice is the best choice, and where engaging in that choice feels good to the player. Using NO abilities at all is a very hard choice to have feel good for players, and has to be used carefully and sparingly. (Quaking, the Mythic+ Affix, is a good example of this done well, and the threat of being Kicked in PVP provides ever-present tradeoffs for many casters)Trading DPS for Your Life: An Interesting Choice?“If you're in an arena match and are low on health being melee attacked, but so is your target on the enemy team, do you use your next GCD to try to finish off your opponent, or to get yourself out of harm's way?“The first example given to us describes a tradeoff between Offensive Ability usage and Defensive or Utility Ability usage. This is interesting because it marks a complete and total change in Blizzard’s Class Design Philosophy.If you look through a list of Abilities that are considered “Off Global Cooldown” (the best list I can find is here — I realize it’s out of date), you’ll note that every single class currently has major Utility and Defensive options Off Global Cooldown.And yet, by and large, core rotational DPS abilities are all “On Global Cooldown”.The Game Design Philosophy here is very clear. The Global Cooldown exists to govern the base rhythm of active combat, while major defensive and utility options are left off-Global Cooldown so that if you are asked to do something non-Patchwerk on a Boss fight, you are not reluctant to do so because you need those GCDs for DPS!!!That last part is actually a quote (including the 3 exclamation marks!!!) from World of Warcraft’s ex-Lead Systems Designer (Ghostcrawler), posted in 2010, in a forum thread explaining Blizzard’s philosophy on the GCD and why being completely GCD-locked by core damage abilities was not healthy. Link here.To reiterate, Blizzard’s Lead Systems Designer from 2008 through 2013, believed that Defensive or Situational Utility usage should not be constrained by the Global Cooldown, as it creates conflict between your Core Identity and the needs of your raid, party, or team.When the two are in conflict, the resulting choice is not interesting, merely frustrating.Watcher Understands and Agrees with this Principle!“Back then, someone tasked with interrupting a boss would often stop using any abilities at all when it was their turn in the rotation, lest they find themselves on cooldown and unable to interrupt…technically a decision, but more of a nuisance than a satisfying choice.”This shows that Blizzard understands the principle here between Core Identity and the Raid’s needs being in conflict. Taking hands off the keyboard isn’t a satisfying choice for players unless it’s used sparingly and as a specific mechanic.“Similarly, trying to use Lay on Hands to save the day in response to a sudden dip in your tank's health, only to have the spell fail to cast because you'd executed a standard part of your rotation a half-second prior, simply felt bad.”Read that second paragraph, except with just the bold parts. Skip the rest. Because the principle here doesn’t care what the name of the spell is. If it’s a spell outside your Core Identity, but a spell that marks part of your Class Identity, and you try to use it to save the day — it’s the same principle.The Real Bogeyman: Offensive Cooldown StackingOffensive Cooldown Stacking is where the entire saga of re-evaluating the Global Cooldown began, at least internally at Blizzard."In endgame raid and dungeon situations, stacking all possible cooldowns has an outsized impact on someone’s total performance…”There are two facts wrapped up in this Problem Statement:Stacking Cooldowns is the current optimal strategyPlayer performance inside Cooldown Stacking is the determining factor in total performanceA nuanced and interesting discussion might acknowledge that some specs in the game SHOULD play in a very Cooldown-centric pattern (Fury Warriors amusingly come up here, in Watcher’s post, in Ghostcrawler’s 2010 post from above, and in one of the major /r/wow threads on the GCD topic). And you won’t be surprised to know that different specs do in fact have more or less of their damage contained within their regular Offensive Cooldown windows.Still, perhaps Blizzard feels that more classes and specs would benefit from doing relatively more damage outside these major cooldown windows? I think a lot of us could get behind that.“With them off the GCD, talenting into such abilities often just becomes a matter of adding another line to a burst macro without any additional gameplay as a result.”I bolded the “just” here, because talenting into a DPS-increase ability should always, in a healthy Talent system, come with tradeoffs and be a meaningful choice in its own right. The meaningful choice should be made in the Talent window. If one of those choices is for a huge ““passive”” damage boost every 2 minutes…so be it!I say ““passive””, but properly using (and stacking) major Cooldowns to maximum effectiveness is actually an important skill on any non-Patchwerk fight, and a real mark of differentiation between skilled and unskilled players.By moving these abilities to the Global Cooldown no additional gameplay is created and neither Problem Statement 1) nor 2) is solved. So if this doesn’t solve any of the originally articulated problems, why even talk about stacking Offensive Cooldowns and the Global Cooldown?A Familiar Story: PVP Balance Vs. PVE Gameplay“…in PvP, the fact that major damage amplifiers can be applied simultaneously with an outgoing damage ability (e.g. Battle Cry/Recklessness -> Avatar -> Mortal Strike) heavily limits counterplay and makes worst-case burst damage more severe.“Here, at last, we come to the real thorny issue. In PVP, if someone stacks all their Offensive Cooldowns, which they should do because of their multiplicative nature, there is the potential to kill a player immediately. You get “Globaled”, “100-0’d”, “Insta-gibbed”.Maybe that sucks. Is it even a real issue right now in World of Warcraft PVP? Take the recent Arena Tournament — two of the quickest 100-0 kills I saw both came in Reformed vs. Rejects matchups. In both cases, it took 4+ seconds to get the kill and required almost every major Offensive Cooldown to be used by 2-3 players. Here’s a VOD (link), timestamped to 3m57s.The Priest who died with “limited counterplay” won the whole tournament, and no opponent of his was able to recreate this “easy” win. Comparing this tournament to previous ones, without Dampening, I cannot find evidence to support the idea that the current state is so bad as to require a fundamental tempo slow to the micro-level gameplay of WoW PVP, especially in a historical context of what people have enjoyed.I’m not going to link all. the prior. Arena tournaments. where kills arose from normal DPS pressure, a single CC onto a healer, and then sometimes a single follow-up Offensive Cooldown to secure a kill. Go watch those 5 short clips I linked, some great games, no Dampening required! WoW PVP has always been about “Pressure” and kills that can happen very quickly. I use Arena Tournaments to highlight play at the highest level, but we all know this has been true at every level of play.Something IS Wrong With PVPBlizzard does still have a point here, something is rotten in the state of PVP, and it’s a point I want to use Official Blizzard PVP Desk-Host, multi-Glad, and Analyst, Ziqo, to emphasize, because he put the argument together very nicely on Allcraft.Ziqo (link to video, timestamped to 38m27s):“The way Cooldowns used to be used was to finish people off. As the game stands now, if I cast Polymorph on the Healer without my [45 second+ major damage cooldowns up], then all I’m doing is giving the Healer free Diminishing Returns protection from future CC. I don’t have kill pressure, and it’s ultimately rewarding for the enemy team to sit in a full CC chain…Frostbolt used to do more than 1% of someone’s HP bar, just by itself.”Offensive Cooldowns are too strong RELATIVE to baseline DPS pressureThe result is that in Ranked Arena PVP, teams have almost no “Kill Pressure” without using major Offensive CooldownsThus, the Healer or DPS trades their Defensive Cooldown in response to Offensive CooldownsThen the teams swap roles aggressing, trade their cooldowns out again, and wait for Dampening to set inThis lack of constant “Kill Pressure” is much less engaging for players and viewersBlizzard appears to (mistakenly) believe that using a Defensive Cooldown to negate an Offensive Cooldown is the Gold Standard of counterplay — and that deaths caused by poor knowledge, positioning, and strategy are not “fair”NONE of this is about the GCDMy solution is for Blizzard to focus on balancing the relative strength of class Damage-Output outside of stacked cooldowns vs. inside of them. This would truly address all their stated concerns, in PVE and PVP, without clunki-fying the gameplay.TL;DR — how did this happen?It’s good practice to review major game systemsOffensive Cooldown stacking in PVP creates burst windows that Blizzard finds unhealthyTo mitigate this, Blizzard put many Offensive Cooldowns on the GCDOnce they started putting Offensive CDs on the GCD, they escalated to a full review, incl. Defensive & Utility CDsIt’s frustrating to have to choose between Saving A Life and Doing DPS, not interestingA real solution is to decrease the power of Offensive CDs globally, and increase baseline rotation powerLet me know what you think, or if you guys think I’m misreading the situation. I’d love to hear feedback from others — specifically on other ways we can “smooth” damage out and help shift power in a lot of specs to outside their major Offensive Cooldown windows.