I won't argue that things seem to be improving, hoping that burst damage is actually toned down this time. It's not all doom and gloom but it does require that Blizz consciously adds softer classes's survivability to the equation when adding all these new abilities. I'm somewhere on the neutral line leaning slightly toward pessimist: you have to remember that the armor buff was removed so the actual defense addition ends up being half of the buff. Something like shadowflame would be nice; I don't see revamped blood fear being a pillar of our pvp-play as it was pre-5.2, a pretty solid net negative change. It shouldn't be as it was clearly too much, but it was relied upon a lot for having a melee in your face. I can't confirm this despite doing some looking but I've seen it mentioned that Nadagast is switching to monk, it's not the sky falling but when old veterans start moving it kicks you right in the moral.
I've been mulling one of our issues over, that we have the only spec that requires you to sit there and channel to put out any kind of pressure. Without the channel our dots tick less than dk diseases (this was at least true at the beginning of the expansion, haven't verified it since). What's really punitive is that an interrupt on the channel locks us out of the vast majority of our spells.
With the imminent free glyph slot a solution could be a glyph of malefic grasp. Instead of a channel it makes it a dispelable modifier you apply in the same vein as haunt with a 1.5 sec cast, not sure about the duration. Can only be cast on one target. I know we're sick of the double modifier but it's no different than the current system and allows us more freedom after it's applied. To not impact pve it would need to be a dps loss, perhaps remove it's native damage and only keep the modifier. Make sure it doesn't stack with drain soul. We would lose our filler but we still have fel flame and the ability to cc, spread dots, etc. It would be a lot less taxing than the current spec but would still take finesse to maximize uptime for mg and haunt on top of our dots. It doesn't solve our defense issues but it allows us to be effective if we get breathing room. Plus it will synergize well with the UA dispel buff, making it an actual decision whether it would be better to dispel rather than healing through it with ease.