It would be really awesome if he had some way to generate permanent armor up buffs so he could access his utility and fury at the same time. Also decreasing the hold time to .8 seconds would make it more manageable IMO.
I checked with the team and I was able to confirm what is happening here. Civil Warrior will pause Armor Up Buffs on him as soon as his Special Attacks begin. Because his SP1 gives him more Armor Up after this, these new Buffs aren't paused and will show to be ticking down as normal. Because the newest Buffs go on top of the "stack", you'd only be able to see time ticking down on the new Armor Ups, and wouldn't be able to see that the other ones have been paused unless the newest ones were allowed to expire. I hope that helps clear things up!