Anyway, getting back on topic, can you see the point I'm trying to make here, Shinra? That whatever the itemization issues, options exist for sustained Prot DPS, those options never favored stacking Shield Slam damage, and the current round of changes provide some breathing room for getting away from over-reliance on Heroic Strike?
There are indeed options available, blizzard just chooses to deliberately avoid them for various reasons. Some sort of talent that, say, converted stamina into strength, or allowed for some sort of passive arp based on another stat, or even a deep prot talent to tweak heroic strike (yes, I know they are planning on getting rid of it, but it exists now and should be taken into consideration).
Baking in threat to shield slam is a clumsy way to work around a clumsy and pointless nerf. I also think that you don't give people enough credit re: sbv, either; the massive buff and subsequent focus was originally blizzard's "solution" to block being horrible, along with prot dps issues. Analogous to arp, but without any postbuff adjusting. Paladins, though, blessedly remain free of any sbv tweaking.
as far as these changes allowing us to move away from HS: they don't. if you're actually tanking content that matters, the threat from devastate is still inconsequential compared to the threat generated from heroic strike. It won't even be that much of a damage buff: the 20% is only to half of the damage of the ability (weapon damage vs sunder bonus damage), and devastate makes up charitably 20% of a typical prot warrior's damage. So, we'll still need to hs every swing and still be more or less forced into fast weapons for progression content, but we'll be doing about 4% more damage (before taking the damage nerfs into account)!
The buff does win us something, though: it gets us away from an over-reliance on...revenge
sweet