I’m not convinced the removal of Spell Block is a good idea. Firstly, outside of balancing concerns, I disagree with eliminating active defensive gameplay to replace it with passives. This shifts the decision making around survivability away from the actual moment-to-moment gameplay of managing defensives to meet your needs during an encounter into the choices of passive defensive or stat nodes when making your build, or away from the player entirely if they just grab a build off a guide.
The rationale given that it required too much specialized knowledge to know when it would or wouldn’t work runs afoul of Paladin’s Holy Shield blocking spells under the same logic, or abilities like Spell Reflection or AMS for Death Knights require the same specialized knowledge to memorize which particular spells are deflected, or reflected. Arguably the titular “reflect” part of Spell Reflection is even more rare and without in-game signal, requiring memorizing the player-made spreadsheet from experimentation, or usage of a weakaura to signal when it should be used. I understand the focus on consistency, the DK segment called out the frustration of grip-immune adds, but using this as the standard for removal raises questions about the aforementioned spreadsheet showing the current raid has a total of TWO spells that work with Spell Reflect’s main function, and both are deflects. Also, the immobilizing aspect of Demolish is supposed to come with immunity to forced movement, but I seem to be pushed out of melee range more often than I resist it in the same expansion as it was introduced.
The new talent Spellbreaker has interesting theme, but functionally steps on the toes of what Spell Reflect is supposed to do, and feels weird that in the same patch DK is having the chance stripped out of their hero talents to make them consistent and reliable, warriors are getting a defensive node that only works 4% of the time. If the goal was to address the need for spreadsheets again or button bloat then why not give it the same treatment as Worthy Sacrifice on Paladins, or Whirling Blade/Ravager in this same update with a choice node?
On the talent tree as a whole, the stated goal of increasing flexibility by breaking up the vital “locked in” nodes, feel like it has instead meant you are now locked in to even more nodes trying to pick up all the pieces of what you had before. If you went solely for the defensive and resource nodes you run out of points before you even start thinking about utility or damage.
Considering player motivation this may make builds feel even more restrictive, since the prior tree’s sense of “grab the vital ones and play around in between with what little you have less” is replaced with “ Guess how much you need to live this content, if you guess wrong you have to zone out and respec” which kinda incentivizes the risk-averse answer of “I guess I’ll dump every point into living and live with having anemic damage and low utility, until I learn exactly how much % tankiness I need for every encounter” which just introduces a new form of spreadsheet-like memorization.
Edit: Gave it a few days to feel it out, I think the intent is that magic damage will become the thing that actually makes our health bar move, and that we heal back through Fueled by Violence. I still dont really agree with this system as there isn’t any gameplay around it beyond making sure your bleeds are out, and this renders only one hero talent viable with the colossus tier bonus tying into bleed healing while mountain thane’s doesnt while introducing new must-take nodes. If this is the intent, I would rather Prot Warrior get something in the style of Fury’s Enraged Regeneration to temporarily give a massive boost to leech or something, so there is something different than our normal rotation to do about incoming spell damage (assuming our remaining defensives are enough to cover not being killed outright in addition to what we already use them for)
regarding community perception, Spell Block was introduced fairly recently as a saving grace at a time when Prot Warr was seen as incredibly weak against any kind of spell damage especially in dungeons like Halls of Atonement. In the absence of seeing internal dev tools assessment of how that has changed, I don’t think the playstyle and feel of Prot Warrior has changed enough since shadowlands to make this not feel like going straight back to tissue-paper vulnerability against magic. Especially in a tier that brings back a dungeon that demonstrated that weakness keenly when it was new, and with a raid that at first glance features an awful lot of pure-magic tankbusters.
Edit 2: I also want to highlight that specialized knowledge such as what spells are blockable/reflectable, or can be prevented with AMS creates a very fun part of the early season when the tanks are sharing secret little tricks about a huge reflect you can do on a boss or a mechanic that can be bypassed and the design goal that this is bad and it is preferable that tanking be as straight-forward and nuance-less as possible feels like it pushes tanking to be as bland/boring and repetitious as possible. If the answer to every problem is “just press shield wall”, and if it comes too frequently, “beg the healer for an external” there’s not a lot of stuff to talk about, and the changes posted already remove “actually you can handle that whole thing with spell block” while threatening removing all the others.