Quote Originally Posted by CidHeiral View Post
I'm not mocking you but I am genuinely mystified and curious as to how this is possible. You played for years without noticing that some buttons aren't on the global cooldown? How?
Hm...no ofeense taken, then.

Well, for one thing, I played healers almost exclusively, and at the time I think their casts took up the whole GCD, so oGCDs weren't much more than "more responsive" heals (being all instant casts). I also mainly played WHM, which didn't have many oGCDs. Benediction always has had that weird delay and Asylum had to be targeted so it didn't really come across as something you could use whenever. I also came from WoW and I don't recall any of the classes I played in WoW having abilities that didn't work with the GCD system (again, the ones I played), so the idea genuinely didn't occur to me there'd be non-GCD based abilities. I also tend to play by feel (controller) a lot, so I don't usually keep my eyes on my crossbars, meaning things staying lit up or not wouldn't have been apparent at all since my eyes were on party health bars and I healed with (as was the way to do it at the time in ARR and HW) Cure/Regen/Medica spells that I knew the locations of by feel on my controller. It's hard to see something when you aren't ever looking at it.

And think about it, the name is Global CoolDown. Which heavily implies it affects everything. And you can't use an oGCD while a GCD is in progress or within the 0.7 sec animation lock of it.

If you aren't looking for it or don't know about it already, it's not very apparent that it's a thing. Again, I started noticing it specifically in PotD because of Pacification because that DOES gray out everything EXCEPT your Abilities, which makes it stark that there's some kind of difference there. It doesn't really say anything about what that difference is, but it makes it clear there is one.

And as far as I can tell, the game never actually defines the difference between a Weaponskill (GCD disabled by Pacification), Spell (GCD disabled by Silence), and an Ability (oGCDs). It doesn't tell you the difference between them in any way. It doesn't tell you that oGCDs can be weaved, doesn't tell you what clipping is, how many oGCDs can be weaved without clipping, or what Animation lock is, or extended animation lock (gap closers/openers) vs normal abilities, nor the edge case things (RDM's Enchanted Weaponskills having reduced GCD limiting weaves).

Some of these could be considered more advanced topics, but the basic stuff it really should teach in the game. Though I'm not sure how to standardize that, considering many Jobs don't get an oGCD until super late, so Hall of the Novice wouldn't work unless we give every Job an oGCD before level 15.

Now, this might have been different for someone playing Jobs with lots of instant casts, but for healers with 2.5 sec GCD and 2.5 sec cast times, oGCDs not exactly stand out like they do for a melee with all instant cast attacks.