I don’t quite see the dire need of having Expel Harm for the sake of the heal, to be honest. I sort of understand people that miss the second Chi generator (even though I’ve come to think that we don’t need it anymore), but if the heal is what you’re concerned about, you can play Soothing Mist and Vivacious Vivification to fill that gap.
It’s almost certainly intended, and I think we’ll get used to it again like we have been before. Certainly not my favorite change, but I can understand why it was made. It really doesn’t make any sense that we could cast through SCK after all.
However, they do need to fix some unintended interactions. Chi Burst damage/heal events, picking up Chi orbs, and arguably even Roll should not interrupt the channel. (That last one may not be unintentional, but still.)
While I agree with you from a thematic perspective, now that SEF casts Tiger’s Lust on themselves when you do, they shouldn’t be much more subject to cc than your player character is. In fact, it might be a lot better against single target ccs than Serenity would be. (Take that with a grain of salt, I’m not a pvper and perfectly willing to be proven wrong.)
Low haste may have something to do with it, but gameplay mistakes can also cause this. Most importantly, overusing BoK and SCK in ST and aoe respectively. I’ve had practically no resource issues in either ST or aoe since prepatch started, even during a 10m training dummy session.
I’m glad it’s gone, it concentrated too much damage in too short a window, exacerbated by being triggered by Tiger Palm which can’t be freely delayed. The mobility loss doesn’t feel that bad especially with Lighter than Air.