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Avoidance and Spikes
I think what you are comparing here is a tank with high avoidance to one with lower avoidance. Your definition of "spiky" here is just that the tank with lower avoidance gets hit more often. That's usually not what players are talking about though. If you compare a tank with 50% avoidance to a tank with 0% avoidance, then the latter guy is taking a ton more damage, but he is taking the same damage every hit. For every unit of time, the incoming damage is the same, which is generally easier for healers and the tank himself to plan around.
When people say high avoidance causes spikes, what they usually mean is that a tank who chooses avoidance over mitigation (armor) will avoid some damage completely but then suddenly get clobbered. That's a spike. By reducing the amount of attacks that a boss fails to land (because of dodge), we can lower the amount of damage that a boss does per hit while still keeping the same boss damage over time. We need to keep the same damage over time because that is scaled to healing over time. If we just nerfed dodge without adjusting boss damage, then we'd just be killing tanks more often.
Bosses in Icecrown Citadel and effects of Chill of the Throne
1) Bosses won't swing faster. More of their swings will hit.
2) Tanks that avoid less are generally easier for healers to heal (provided the numbers aren't just too great).
3) Tank healing was fun in Sunwell, IMO. Sunwell was challenging. That's what a lot of players are looking for in the final raid tier. If you don't like the challenge of healing a tank then I'm not sure why you'd want to be a healer. Now as I've said, we're not saying Icecrown is only for the Sunwell crowd. But I am pretty convinced there are going to be a lot of "Icecrown is too hard because my tank died" posts here when it goes live.
Paladin
Paladins too defensive in PvP
I'll add it's also a problem where paladins as a whole are too defensive and not just the Protection spec ones. You see people describing fighting a Retribution paladin as a three phase boss fight. You might get them down, but then they can reset the fight with Lay on Hands. You get them down again and they bubble and heal. Compare this to an Arms warrior -- do they do great damage in PvP? Yes. Are they invulnerable? No. It's cool for paladins to care more about healing than do warriors, for I hope obvious reasons. However, if you are up against a Holy paladin, you should know that one of your greatest challenges should be dealing with their capacity to heal. If you are up against a Prot paladin, you should be concerned with their capacity to take hits. If you are up against a Ret paladin, you should be concerned with how much damage they should deal. You should not, generally, be nearly as concerend about the Prot's ability to self-heal or the Ret's ability to tank you.
I said this recently, but to reiterate, for most of the other hybrids, picking a role in a fight is much more of a commitment. Sure the Arms warrior can go Defensive Stance and put on a shield, but that doesn't turn them into a Prot warrior. Nobody is super concerned about Feral druids shifting out to heal. We had big problems with DKs earlier being able to tank and deal damage with the same set of tools, but that's in a better place now. Shaman maybe the only other class besides paladins that are able to shift on the fly from dps to healing, but with their mail armor and lack of major defensive cooldowns they just don't feel as hard to kill.
Don't nerf me bro!
This is just “don’t nerf me, bro” talk. We have been so gentle with paladin nerfs because we’ve been so concerned with returning to lolret, that paladins as a class are still very powerful in end-game LK in both PvE and PvP. Yes, it’s not fun to be nerfed. We get that. There is very little evidence we have over-nerfed paladins at any time in the past couple of years. There is plenty of evidence that we haven’t nerfed them enough.
