Who's saying we are staring at it, we are just glancing down to see what is on and off cooldown. This doesn't have to be mental chess. There was no reason to MAKE us have to track cooldowns for multiple abilities. We can't see it clearly when it's up, and that's a problem. There's nothing else to it. These self-righteous "you should be able to deal with it" posts are irrelevant. Just because it's possible to play through it doesn't make it a good change.

You obviously aren't looking for what is available in advance then. The brightness of the cooldown effect, combined with the dark shadow behind it makes it much harder to tell if a spell if off cooldown while the GCD is occuring. I play on low ping, so to keep up I HAVE to predict and hit buttons in advance. It might not be an issue for the people with 30 ping / those who don't care about maximising their DPS, but it is certainly not an improvement on the previous system. Why "give it a few days" when it is clearly not better. There is nothing to get used to, it obscures vision and is quite clearly worse than the previous version. The flashing effect is just plain annoying as well. It's visually unpleasant, impractical, and a huge step backwards. Please fix this BW.

^ This. Easy solution: Make this an option in preferences, if people want to old one, allow them to disable the new effect. That way everyone's happy.

This was the issue they were trying to fix. They added in a flashing effect that wasn't needed, however. All they needed to do was make it so that abilities that were on CD were blue'd/grey'd out. This new effect is obscuring vision. It gets in the way if you are trying to check what is up while you are using other abilities. If you have ever played a Carnage marauder, your rotation isn't set, it's based off a priority order. The new effect just makes it harder to see what's up. I don't need glasses and I don't need to get any better, those have nothing to do with it. I'm saying the new system is worse than the old one, and the problem being addressed could have been fixed without obscuring vision with flashing and heavy shadow during GCD. It looks cool, but its not as practical. Edit: It's possible the problems I am experiencing are specific to Rage users... It's simply harder to see what will be available to use once the GCD is over.

While I appreciate the attempt to make it more obvious which spells were on cooldown, I feel the new effects are just making it harder to see which abilities are available. The flashing and washout effects obscure the visibility of the abilities, and the flashing occurs after it has come off cooldown (making it difficult to react quickly as you cannot quite tell if it is available or just part of the GCD flashing). All that was needed was to add a dark blue or reddish tinge to the abilities which were on cooldown, as the old GCD effect was sufficient and didn't obscure vision. Is anyone else not liking the new effect?

While I appreciate the attempt to make it more obvious which spells were on cooldown, I feel the new effects are just making it harder to see which abilities are available. The flashing and washout effects obscure the visibility of the abilities, and the flashing occurs after it has come off cooldown (making it difficult to react quickly as you cannot quite tell if it is available or just part of the GCD flashing). All that was needed was to add a dark blue or reddish tinge to the abilities which were on cooldown, as the old GCD effect was sufficient and didn't obscure vision. Is anyone else not liking the new effect?

While I appreciate the attempt to make it more obvious which spells were on cooldown, I feel the new effects are just making it harder to see which abilities are available. The flashing and washout effects obscure the visibility of the abilities, and the flashing occurs after it has come off cooldown (making it difficult to react quickly as you cannot quite tell if it is available or just part of the GCD flashing). All that was needed was to add a dark blue or reddish tinge to the abilities which were on cooldown, as the old GCD effect was sufficient and didn't obscure vision. Is anyone else not liking the new effect?

They basically have to weigh up differences between... 1. PvP and PvE gear, and 2. Undergeared lvl 50's and PvP geared lvl 50's If they close the gap between freshly levelled, undergeared lvl 50's and the PvP geared lvl 50's (which is only sensibly achieved by nerfing PvP gear), then they will reduce the effectiveness of PvP gear in comparison to PvE gear (which is what most PvPers are complaining about). Conversely, if they close the gap between PvP and PvE gear (by buffing PvP gear), then they increase the gap between freshly levelled, undergeared lvl 50's and the PvP geared lvl 50's. The most complete solution to this would be to nerf high-end PvP gear (to close the gap) AND nerf PvE gear by even more (so that PvP gear is more effective in PvP then PvE gear). This means they would have to change the difficulties of every PvE encounter, which is unreasonable to expect. Tl;dr: You can't have your cake and eat it.