While both of those may certainly help lessen the power of stallers for now, that is a big limitation to life wizards who can and should be able to play with those abilities. At the moment the problem is more or less people not attempting to win by abusing these mechanics. It’s unfortunate that these players choose to do this, but nerfing the defining abilities of certain schools doesn’t fix the problem completely. I’m not sure there is a problem with healing boost or guardian spirit outside of stallers so removing those tools would not be the best solution. I hope we see more changes with future updates to fix the stalling problems that don’t necessarily interfere with the identity of defensive schools.

If you go first you automatically lose, if you go second you need to accurately assess that your opponent is a timer player and quickly pass within the first round otherwise you would have lost the game within the first 30 seconds.

Removing Guardian Spirit is a huge step. The second is by limiting heal boost.

Speaking from lots of chess-playing experience online, internet connectivity/lag really only makes a serious difference when the starting time in a game is exceptionally low (< 1 minute). Of course, wiz is radically different from chess, so take that with a grain of salt. Dirty flagging (trying to win on time regardless of the quality of your "position") is much more likely to be a danger than connection issues, which is why I wouldn't be opposed to adding increment based on principle alone (I'm not a fan of the clock even potentially being a large factor in the primary time control of a "competitive" game). Something like +5 seconds per move if time is low (< 2 mins, maybe) and you're not repeatedly casting shields/heals seems like a decent way of avoiding flagging while making it hard to stall indefinitely.

I fear that this will turn PvP into “stall strategy plus optimal Internet connection” )although the stall strategy probably will involve a lot more 0-pip spells since passing costs 10 seconds each) but, of course, I could be wrong…