Yeah it's good timing. I downloaded Rift while the balance patch of doom was (very slowly) downloading. Only bad thing is that the RIFT servers are getting swarmed and the popular servers have 2-3 hour log in queues.
Yeah the Divine Astral Shield duration fix killed the enjoyment for me. I don't care much about the stacking getting fixed, but I'm hoping for a sort of compromise, to extend the duration to maybe 12 or 13 seconds. Maybe that's too much to hope for though.