Bosses won't hit for 40k.

I still stand by the statement. Most of your examples seem to be Gormok's Impale which has a lot more going on (dots, tank transitions) than just hitting a single tank really hard. Those encounters drop really high level gear. If you're tanking him with item level 226 (because you've only been in the instance 5 weeks and maybe your tanks haven't gotten a lot of drops) then you've got some deficit to make up. The good news is that because of the way loot works in that instance, you can choose to gear your tanks really quickly if you so desire.

Yes, you will still need to work to keep your tanks up. That's just part of hard mode. But my suspicion is still that the community won't jump to tank class choice as the explanation for why a certain fight is easier or harder for them. Or, more realistically, they still will, but... alas.

Q u o t e:
This thread has sort of devolved into a discussion of which tanks are best for the Heroic Beasts encounter, but regarding the OP I'd note that Heroic Beasts is really the only big-number fight in the zone. Yeah, tanks take some massive damage. That's not the case for the other fights in the zone--tank healing wasn't that big a deal for Jaraxxus or the Valkyr, and obviously the Champions aren't tanked in a conventional sense. I can't speak for Anub'arak.

So yeah, Beasts hit pretty hard. But that's the point--it's the big gear check for the zone. It's supposed to brutalize under-geared or under-experienced raids that zone in just to take a crack at some 258 loot.

Yeah, I agree with that. While I often emphasize the role of skill over gear, gear does matter. Yes, you had to wait 5 weeks before you could get to heroic mode, but that doesn't necessarily mean you have the gear necessary to blast through that encounter. (And even if you did, I think we'd all get pretty bored if even moderately talented raiding guilds were on heroic Anub already.)

I don't yet see too many people saying that bringing a paladin trivializes Gormok in the way DKs didn't need to kite Vezak, but we'll see when more guilds have the kill under their belt.

Q u o t e:
So its ok that DKs and warriors are getting stomped because we have "a gear deficit".

Everyone is getting stomped by this fight. I have yet to see an undergeared raid make it through simply because they had a paladin tank. Meanwhile, plenty of warrior + DK tank pairs have made it through.

It’s a hard mode and it’s going to be hard. The small number of bosses means we don’t have as much granularity as we did in Ulduar to have easier bosses and harder bosses. We might very well end up nerfing it over time, but it’s too early to plan on that yet. I increasingly feel that this is a “Hard mode is too hard” discussion, and I am only fanning the flames by posting here.

There is a lot of damage coming at your tank, which is appropriate for a hard mode. We don't want the success or failure of every fight to be on whether your MT can take two hits before dying, which was the context of my original "Coliseum is less about blowing up the tank" comment. While Gormok may put a lot of healing pressure on you, there is more going on than just the size of his swings. I regret a little making that original comment because it seems some people have taken it to mean that tank healing won't be as challenging. Some of our players are very much looking for a challenge.

If you just don't like the way we do hard modes, well okay, fine, but then that discussion should really be in dungeons and raids where the encounter designers are more likely to see it. For purposes of this forum, I am more interested in whether picking the "wrong" tank class is a huge bottleneck for the Northrend Beasts and I don't believe it is. The beasts themselves may be a bottleneck though.

Q u o t e:
You say that we don't have the gear to blast the encounter, yet there are guilds that have blasted through it easily.

Those are very skilled guilds. Many of them did it with a warrior MT.