Swing and a miss

So we have the suggested change is that charge and intercept will no longer break roots, and we have a nerf to shield slam at high levels of strength or BV which we are told will not impact at normal levels of PvE gearing.

What does this mean then?

Well the Warbringer nerf is really disappointing and will affect PvE. I regularly use charge to escape snares in dungeon tanking - lots of mobs have frost nova or similar abilities and especially on multi-caster pulls this will make the job much harder. It won't affect raiding much, which is something I guess, but dungeons such as Halls of Reflection just got a fair amount more difficult.

This leaves paladins and druids able to break snares at will (via Hand of Freedom and shapeshifting), and DKs able to grab casters via death grip. Warriors will need to wait for the cooldown on heroic throw to expire I suppose, or use a racial ability. I don't want to be all falling skies about this, because it's not that much of a big deal, but it's a shame.

As for the shield slam nerf - assuming Blizzard get their numbers right then fine, no bother. The threat bonus is actually a buff if Blizzard are correct. Separation of damage from threat output is a backward step for a spec which still lags way behind other tanking classes, in damage terms. This is in the context of an expansion which has seen regular small buffs to prot dps as Blizzard realise each patch that prot warrior damage is still too low. I pull about 1.8k in a single target situation these days, and my rotations are now pretty strong - it's less if I have to move about, or interrupt regularly (ie leaving 10 rage as a minimum). I get rage starved in any content prior to ToC10 now too. Bah.

We will have to see whether Blizzard leave our only hard-hitting attack alone. There is still QQ on the forums about shield slam, and I see that heroic throw and spell reflect are now deemed to be unbalanced by arena players. It was telling that Bornakk in the thread I linked makes reference to a prot warrior locking down a mage and for the prot warrior's "partner" to be uncontrolled. Still balancing around the 2v2 arena bracket then are you then Ghostcrawler? Even though it is now defunct? I remain of the view that the introduction of small scale PvP via the arena system was a bad mistake by Blizzard.