First off, let me say my intention for this thread is to highlight the most egregious issues with Loki's kit and give simple suggestions that could be implemented rather quickly, and would not need serious testing to determine balance. It is quite obvious Loki's kit needs an in-depth look, as it is a pretty big mess, but I highly doubt that will happen sometime soon. As such, please consider some of these stop-gap ideas on how to improve his powerset.
1.) Loki has 4 passives (his two toggles count as one in this respect), which is already too many. However, Spatial Deception also has a passive element in boosting his illusions. I never really counted it as one because I maxed the skill anyway to use as my filler attack. However, if one the intentions with these tuning changes is to make his other filler attacks viable, then this essentially becomes a 5th passive. This is extremely excessive, and I don't know how anyone can really argue otherwise. Most new heroes (and recently QOL'd) have 2 passives (1 offensive and 1 defensive). Loki is in serious need of some passive consolidation. With half our points tied up in passives, we are seriously hurting on being able to use them on actual attack skills.
Ideally, we'd change him to fit the standard 2 passive formula, but I'll compromise here and give some simple suggestions to narrow it down to 3.
-Shift SD's Illusion stat boost passive portion to Lord of Deception.
-Get rid of Jotun Blood. Move the Power aura part to Master Sorcer, and just have it be active all the time. Move the HP portion to both toggles. Frost toggle gets the bonus to slow portion. Add the defense portion to frost toggle, and convert that to deflect to be added to the sorcery toggle.
Voilà, you now have only 3 passives.
2.) Bar bloat. With Lay Waste now a cooldown power, this means the potential for adding another power to my skill bar. The problem is, I have no spots left on my main bar. Secondary skills like heal skills or CC breakers are fine on 2nd bar, but main rotation skills should all be able to fit on one bar, in my opinion. I really don't want to be forced to use 2 bars, and I do not want to edit my ini.
Right now, I have to use a 1-point skill in Spikes and another non-maxed skill in Projection (my point dump) on my bar, leaving less space for actual damage skills. Even if I wanted to use Staff Blast for vuln, I still have to use Spikes to get the "power" aura. Yet another reason to move the aura to Master Sorcer, as I detailed in point #1. How about adding vuln to Enthrall or Binding? This would then free up the space needed to add Lay Waste or Meteoric Illusion to my rotation.
To be honest, the new changes that have been just implemented were not very helpful to any build. Lay Waste was the only decent ranged option for filler. Now it is an unimpressive CD power which I have no space on my bar to put, and Staff Blast is a terrible substitute, as it is very low on damage. Most ranged Loki players would prefer you revert Lay Waste back to how it was before.
3.) I'd be remiss to not mention the ult. Very few people like. Most hate it. No one uses it. It is a huge DPS loss, and poor flavor-wise. Almost anything would be better at this point. Even making it so that his sig activated for the full ult duration instead of that awful transformation would be an acceptable substitute until a better solution is found. Hell, I'd even accept Emma Frost's old glitter dinosaurs if we don't care about powers that are true to Loki. The power already exists and is not being used right now.