World Of Warcraft: 2.3 GCD Changes and You

You might not know this, as it wasn't highly advertised, but there was a subtle change to the way information is transmitted to the WoW servers with this recent patch. The good folks over at WoW Insider sum it up well here, but the general idea is that the global cooldown on abilities (usually 1.5 seconds) is now triggered before the request is sent to the server and before lag affects what you're doing. What does this mean? According to Neth nothing really.

Some classes rely on spamming their buttons, namely Rogues, Warriors, and most casters. Post 2.3 there have been greater reports of the terrifying "That ability is not ready yet!" error message, which generally means you've hit a nasty lag spike. According to Neth though:

People are focused too much on the error message vs what this actually does. Rather than the next ability failing and you getting an error message with it, it should now function correctly once the global cooldown is over. I.E. the next spell or ability should cast as expected. The error message was not removed, but it should be much less likely that you will encounter this error now.

Which essentially means you shouldn't be worried. They have since "removed" that message for the majority of those affected, but the general gist I could get the forums was that this change simply made what was previously transparent in terms of lag suddenly violently clear through the sudden inclusion of that horrifying error message.

Of course, this hasn't stopped the original post from spilling over into a brand new one after hitting the post limit. For the record:

It is being worked on, both server side changes (some of which have already shipped) as well as client side changes targeted for 2.3.2.

The issue is not being ignored.

For all you non-spamming classes, there's nothing to see here, just move along. =)