I think we need to return to a 1.0 GCD for death knights. It’s more fun, it fits into the rune system better and it stops the endless requirement to combine abilities with cooldowns to make the class playable.
More fun:
Pressing buttons is fun, that part is basic, but also there are certain debuff or prep spells we must use before getting to our core rotation. Death and Decay, Outbreak, Festering Strike, Howling Blast, Marrowrend, and Chains of Ice are all examples of spells you may need to press before you can move into your regular rotation, reducing the GCD of these abilities would help us blend into our combat more quickly instead of waiting through “I can’t do that yet” messages. Leveling Cata Classic DKs the most exciting part is getting to level 70 and unlocking unholy presence, the difference is night and day, and the class just suddenly feels so much more functional imo.
Fits better into the rune system:
3 runes recharge every 10 seconds, that will generate about 30 runic power, which is the cost of a frost strike or death coil, meaning every 10 seconds we generate potentially 6 seconds worth of resources, this means we only have 4 seconds left with which to spend things like procs, cooldowns or even death grip (seeing as it’s on the GCD for some reason). This is why Sudden Doom had to be changed into something more like killing machine instead of a free death coil, we don’t have room for procs that require a GCD to show up randomly without GCD locking the class randomly. This is also true of procs that just give us resources like runic corruption and runic empowerment, more resources faster means less time to spend them before the next set needs to be spent.
The endless requirement to combine abilities:
Unholy Assault adds festering wounds, Dark Transformation applies Virulent Plague, Abomination applies Virulent Plague and Festering wounds. Blizzard knows that with the current GCD requiring the player to apply outbreak would feel clunky, as we are already GCD locked executing our cooldowns. As a consequence maintaining our dots with Outbreak starts to look like less of a feature and more of chore. Instead of me wanting to apply diseases because they do great damage I’m left wondering if I can squeeze it until the next cooldown period when the diseases will be applied for me with no thought or effort.
So in conclusion, faster GCD is more fun to play, gives more design space within the rune system, and allows us to better utilize our different mechanics instead of needing to combine them every time we step outside of the base rotation.
My favorite versions of each spec through the ages have been a 1.0 GCD or unholy presence variant of the spec. I think we really lost something when we lost this option moving into Legion.
Thoughts?
