It just seems like lazy programming tbh. Rift is now a F2P game and they still manage to make all the OFF THE GCD abilities fire OFF THE GCD.

This is all a small problem now since pvp doesn't exist but once it's added this will become a nightmare if not fixed. There's no skill involved in sitting around twiddling your thumbs until a spell is cast. To keep the analogy going, it's much harder to maintain an optimal dps rotation, while purging buffs, while monitoring 10+ ability cooldowns, while monitoring your positioning to ensure enemy dps can't hit you while being in range of friendly healers, while surveying the field to pick out healers to target and interrupt+silence mid GCD (1.0 sec for most dps, 1.5 at the absolute maximum), than to auto attack something waiting 10+ seconds to interrupt one heal and resume dps.

I LOVE all the pvp based changes that WoW and other games like Rift