Buffs and Instants question

[Herald]

This isn't a tanking specific question but I play a tank and the self buffs that we get as tanks are very important for mitigating damage. Basically I am a little confused on how all the non GCD abilities work. The first instant that I use usually goes off without issue but after that it gets annoying. Is there a hidden cool down between using instants or is it a server lag issue. When I try to work multiple instants in to my rotation between GCD skills it gets even more screwy and I just end up mashing the button until it goes off. If someone could explain how it works or give me some tips it would be appreciated.

[Razul]

I was curious about this as well, having the same issue

[Conradus]

There is an animation lock on many abilities. If you try to use anything while the animation lock is happening (it's generally a half second to a second after the ability is invoked), nothing happens. There's no indication of the cooldown, other than the fact that you can't get anything to happen. I haven't done a rigourous study of them, but they seem to be most common in your main attack moves.

[Kitru]

If you are in the middle of any attack animation, you are incapable of activating any off-GCD abilities because your character is locked into that animation. As such, if you're hitting an off-GCD ability before you hit an attack button, you're queuing up the off-GCD to activate before the next animation so it resolves beforehand. If you use an off-GCD afterwards, on the other hand, it won't activate because you're already occupied. The only way to use multiple off-GCDs in quick succession is to not attack while you're busy clicking the lot of them and, even then, you'll have a slight wait between as each of their animations resolve before you can activate the next one.