#83 - Feb. 3, 2014, 9:26 p.m.
We're going to revert the Charge and Warbringer changes from the 5.4.7 PTR and make a different change. Here's some context:
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.
