

Similarly, and use the debuff to prevent a player from receiving any of these effects within 1 minute of each other. However, they do not share a cooldown, and so can be used in short succession on three different targets. The global or universal cooldown, frequently shortened to "GCD", is the cooldown which starts every time you start to use a spell or ability, and affects all of your class spells and abilities. There are exceptions to this, however, as noted below. The term 'global' is also often used to refer to a single global cooldown.

In this way it serves as a basic unit of measurement for time and ability usage. It may take a certain number of globals to set up a rotation, to deal a certain amount of damage/healing, or to respond to an event. The phrase 'to global' (or 'to be globaled') refers to being killed extremely quickly, such as in the duration of only a single GCD. If a spell has a casting time less than the global cooldown (or instant cast), you generally have to wait the remainder of the global cooldown. If a spell with casting time is interrupted before it has finished casting, the global cooldown is canceled. This allows you to immediately begin casting a new spell, be it the same spell or another. The base global cooldown is generally 1.5 seconds for all classes except rogues, druids, and monks, whose abilities mostly have one second global cooldowns.

However, since patch 2.4.0, haste can reduce the global cooldown to a minimum of 0.75 seconds (1.0 seconds prior to Legion) for the spells that originated from 1.5 second cooldown. Haste doesn't affect GCD of agility energy melee classes like the ones mentioned before. A few specific abilities have global cooldowns as short as 0.5 seconds. The global cooldown affects the wait for the next ability, so using an item or ability with the standard 1.5 second cooldown will require waiting that long before a 1 second global cooldown ability can be used. Some abilities are not affected by the global cooldown, and do not trigger the global cooldown when used.
