Ok, I'll wall text bc why not. My perspective is that of a player with no moolah items, no wings etc etc (undergeared in compairson to most).
The update, as expected, created some imbalance issues, like Fae said, its carnage; With the changes to damage absorb comes a new wave of pvp dominance from classes such as Champion and Vanquisher (the first having incredible high reflect damage and the second well ... wrecking havoc in battlefields due to high damage + ITD's), it used to be Templars and Champions pre-patch, both of these sustaining ungodly amounts of damage and never dying. Me as a very generic Wind Walker am naturally squishy, I try to put up a fight as much as I can with what I have, filling up my gear short-comings with monster trans for different debuffs and whatnot, but it has its limits.
This also applies to cloth users (I use Sorcerer), for a newbie sorcerer with lets say, TOAI gear and GT weapon is very difficult to do anything in pvp due to being extremely squishy and the changes to Absorb only made it worse. I've seen players geared like myself discouraged from doing pvp at all because of how impossible pvp seems at times.
As far as PvE goes, its very .... meh, the fact that not even a budget tank (which should be enough honestly) cant even tank properly in dungeons like CI because of how much magic/phys damage is being dealt, is a bit annoying. Hell, even geared tanks are surprised at the amount of damage monsters are dealing now in end-game dungeons such as Wonderland Insane (around 35k+ from each magic mob), which means that the to-be-implemented Dead Man's Peak isnt going to be very doable for most people. And thats for tanks, squishy classes like the ones I previously mentioned feel even worse to play in PvE. Newbies are going to have a very, very difficult time trying to run dungeons like this x.x, anyways hope you read and take into consideration our oppinions Sedy! We need to find a middle ground