Cooldown reduction is a very useful ability to have in certain cases, as it allows you to make awesome plays like back to back burst timings or double counterspell.
However, those moments are few and far between and overall the contribution of CDR to every ability we have hasn’t really netted much positive results.
Abilities are still tuned around their uptime.
Just because we cast X more often, doesn’t mean we’ll do X% more damage than normal because you’ll be tuned to deal 1/X% less damage anyway to keep up with others, so it doesn’t add much in practice. All Shifting Power ends up doing is accelerating the tempo of the rotation, and honestly the game has already become a lot faster. We don’t need that.
Cooldowns aren’t sync’d up anymore unless you keep them off cooldown intentionally, and this isn’t always intuitive or even beneficial in practice.
We don’t have many abilities on the 1min CD of SP, so naturally you end up delaying Shifting Power til it’s needed OR delaying cooldowns for a burst phase OR etc etc… There’s too much if and or’ing needed to play the specs due the nature of CDR. Things should be more straightforward than this.
Even worse, sometimes you have to use Shifting Power to get utility cds off cooldown faster so you don’t troll your M+ group. What should be a beneficial control spike ends up making things annoying to keep track of, as now you’re not sure where you were in the DPS rotation when things in M+ are hectic enough as it is.
In my opinion, CDR is only interesting if your entire spec is built around it (like Outlaw) or if it targets only one ability at a time, usually an active damage ability that you want to use on CD. Anything else can be annoying to play around.
Trinkets aren’t even affected!
So what ends up happening is that you either delay your burst for them (especially if there’s an ideal burst phase), or you delay your trinket. You introduced a delay after using an ability that presumably reduced delays. It’s not fun.
I think Shifting Power’s visual update was really good, but honestly the only thing that feels good from using it in practice is the increased uptime on utility spell availability like Counterspell or DB.
I’d suggest making Shifting Power be changed to do anything else. You can even remove the CDR and just make it an AOE damage spell so we just use it more simply.
To keep the utility benefits, introduce a new talent that operates much like Cold Snap that reduces the cooldown of our utility spells by x seconds on a 1min cd. This would retain the benefits of SP while removing the unnecessary impact on DPS.