Nerfs to Warriors' Charge and Warbringer reverted... for now
Blizzard Community Manager Lore has posted on the official forums about the reversion of a recent, controversial change to Warrior control against casters. While any class will likely complain about the removal of a CC ability, warriors were particularly vehement about their dislike of the change to take the stun off Charge on the patch 5.4.7 PTR. Warbringer was also altered to stun instead of rooting, so that if you were happy to sacrifice the tier's other talents, you could get the stun back.
Those nay-sayers will be happy to hear that this change has been reverted. Instead, Pummel will be on a shared 15-second cooldown with Disrupting Shout. So, if you Pummel, that will mean your Disrupting Shout is put on a 15-second cooldown, and if you use Disrupting Shout, your Pummel will be put on a 15-second cooldown. The purpose of this change is to make warriors less disruptive to casters -- the same as the purpose of the previous change to Charge, but Charge is a far more difficult ability to alter in the proposed way. Lore gives the example of Charge onto a target with Hand of Freedom active, and there are several other issues that may arise. While this change is superior for PvP, it might have a larger impact on PvE warriors than the previous Charge nerf.
With the changes to CC going forward, in Warlords, it would be no surprise to see this CC change return. But Lore says they don't have time right now... does this mean the new season and patch 5.4.7 are imminent?
We feel that Warriors are too disruptive vs casters in PvP at the moment. To a certain extent it's intended that it should be more difficult to get casts off if there's a melee DPS sticking to you, but Warriors just have too many options along those lines currently. That's part of the thinking behind the change to Charge: as a root, Charge would not interrupt casting, so it would be useful purely as a gap closer and rage generator, not as a way to lock down a caster.
We're reverting it because, although we do think it's a good change and something we're likely to revisit in the future, it's a bit too big of an overall change for 5.4.7. There's a bit of a ripple effect here; making Charge a root certainly accomplishes the goal of scaling back Warrior interrupts, but it opens up some secondary issues (such as "what happens when you Charge a target with Hand of Freedom active?") that we'd need some additional time to clear up. Put another way, we wanted to nerf Warriors' ability to disrupt casters, not their mobility, and at this point in time the Charge change would have been a nerf to both.
So instead, we're making a different change: Pummel and Disrupting Shout will have a 15-second shared cooldown. To be clear: Disrupting Shout will remain at its current 40 second cooldown, but you won't be able to use it within 15 seconds of using Pummel. Likewise, using Disrupting Shout will put Pummel on cooldown.
We may still come back to the Charge change in Warlords, where all sorts of other changes will have happened (especially to CC) that allow it to make more sense, and we can spend more development and testing time on making sure it doesn't have any unwanted side effects. For now, the shared cooldown on Pummel and Disrupting Shout will fill our original intention of making Warriors just slightly less difficult to cast against.
