Last month, Blizzard pushed a patch to the World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth alpha that added several abilities to the global cooldown, or the GCD. But since then, the WoW community has been agitated about how slow the game feels post-update.

Players won't have to deal with this sluggishness for long, though, because World of Warcraft's game director, Ion Hazzikostas, said in a Q&A that the developers are going to be reworking these cooldowns.

The global cooldown is a period of downtime that follows almost any ability cast in WoW. The GCD helps prevent players from being able to spam abilities at will, and historically offensive cooldowns, abilities that make players more powerful for a brief period of time, have been off the GCD.

But now, almost all of these abilities are part of the GCD in addition to some key movement spells that offer no offensive power. Currently, offensive cooldowns can be macro'd into a single button so that all a player needs to do is hit their macro button to activate all their cooldowns at the same time. This takes away some of the players' freedom to make interesting and intuitive decisions.

World of Warcraft players have not been happy, and have been responding with angry forum posts and YouTube discussions about their disdain toward the new expansion. According to Hazzikostas, though, the Blizzard team intends to address and fix some of the players' concerns.

"In one of the upcoming builds, players will see abilities like Heroic Leap and Infernal Strike back off the GCD," Hazzikostas said. "Disengage for hunters as well. We've made some changes to Fury Warrior Blood Bath to give it some upfront damage components so it actually feels like it's doing something instead of just a button that's empowering your future actions."

However, Hazzikostas also talked about the many offensive cooldowns that will stay on the GCD, which is still being tested in the Battle for Azeroth beta. Right now, a player will simply macro an offensive cooldown that they've chosen as a talent into their single button press. This makes the player's talent choice into something that affects the player's damage numbers instead of the player themselves.

"From an overall class balance perspective across all facets of the game, [we were] trying to pull back the importance and power of multiple, stacked cooldowns," Hazzikostas said. "Especially in a world where you can talent into new ones. It was such a no-brainer choice that they manipulatively scaled with each other, and the damage you did during your cooldown window was so sominant compared to what you were doing the entire rest of the time. That had some negative consequences."

Fear not, though, this doesn't necessarily mean the team is against pulling back these changes further. The team encouraged players to share specific feedback about why they don't like the system, rather than just complaining about the patch to Blizzard.

Players that want to make their voice heard about the GCD can share their thoughts with the WoW team directly on the Battle for Azeroth forums.

Players that have been anticipating the new expansion may be glad to hear that it has begun beta testing. The first set of beta keys have been sent out to those who have opted for the beta, and more keys will follow soon.

The expansion features new races, comprehensive class changes, island expeditions, warfronts, and more.

World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth will be available on August 14.

Source: Live Developer Q&A with Ion Hazzikostas (World of Warcraft Twitch channel)