What's changed hmmm...
Well, by and large melees still get owned by casters, unless you're a barbarian. Shield changes, hmmm...are you talking about healer based casters with shields taking block really high and being untouchable by melees?
Well that's sort of fixed.
1) Offensive stance reduces shield effectiveness for healer casters by like 50-75% (depends on class)
2) stun prevents block/parry/dodge from working.
3) channelers bolt spells have been gimped (10 sec recast time)
Unless you're a bow user, the shield thing for casters really isn't the issue anymore. A lot of guilds are fielding teams of super high dex casters who just stack, AoE things and constantly heal themselves. Their def maxes out around 2000 and they're all healers so the only way to counter them is group debuffs. This has been the flavor of the month(s) on Death anyway for a while.
But, with the new map coming out, for the first two weeks anyway, melees should dominate the hell out of casters because the casters won't be able to train their focus skills over 80% and will have crap for atr.
Oh and yeah, hitting R6 is pretty easy with the new zones, especially the one south of Khar.