Cooldown

Overview
Cooldowns are lockout times for abilities. Upon activating an ability or finishing a cast, the cooldown will activate and prevent further use of that specific ability. The global cooldown will also activate and prevent other abilities from being used too quickly.

If an ability is on cooldown, other abilities may be used. Not all abilities have cooldowns, most abilities in the slot 1 ability row will not have a cooldown and can be repeatedly used.

At this time, cooldowns other than the global cooldown cannot be reduced.

Global Cooldown
The global cooldown is an internal cooldown that is not tied to any abilities. The Global cooldown triggers when an ability is activated. The default global cooldown is 1 second, however this can be increased or reduced with buffs or debuffs.

Global Cooldown during casts
The global cooldown is handled in the same way for both casts and instant casts. Upon ability activation the global cooldown triggers.

Global Cooldowns during channels
When channeling, the global cooldown triggers at the beginning of the cast, preventing rapidly canceling the channel and beginning a new channel.

Global Cooldown Reductions
The global cooldown can be reduced by casting speed increases. See the Casting Speed page for more information.

Cooldowns and Casted Abilities
Upon casting an ability, a global cooldown will trigger based on the amount of time it takes to cast the spell. The global cooldown is started when the cast ends, but is reduced by the cast duration. If the cast duration was above the minimum global cooldown (0.4 seconds) then there will be no global cooldown triggered.

Canceling a casted ability by moving will not trigger the global cooldown.

In nearly every situation except during Fast Casting, there will be no apparent global cooldown for casts.

See the Fast Casting page for more information.

Cooldowns and Instant Cast Abilities
When an instant cast ability is activated the cooldown for the ability will immediately trigger and the global cooldown will activate.

Cooldowns and Channeled Abilities
Channeled casts will instantly trigger the cooldown of the ability. The global cooldown is triggered at the beginning of the channel, similar to instant casting. This prevents channels from being activated, canceled and restarted.