And thats more or less what we're doing. If you want to limit the discussion to pure facts, then there's not going to be much of that, since blizzard was delightfully vague about most of their plans and implementation.

Which is fine. Don't promise what you can't deliver. This whole convention is meant to make us excited and chatty like little girls, not to incite a flurry of complaining like actual hard data would inevitably bring.

During the expansion panel, when they previewed the zones, they showed their 2D "storyboard" layouts for zones. I believe I saw at least one arrow that said "To Zul'Drak," along the border of either Dragonblight or Grizzly Hills. I am trying to find a better quality image of their planning maps to see what zones might have been "accidentally" confirmed during that panel.

So far, the zone list would include Howling Fjord, Grizzly Hills, Dragonblight, Lake Wintergrasp, and Borean Tundra for confirmed zones. Unconfirmed zones seem to be Sholazar Basin, Icecrown Glacier, The Storm Peaks, Crystalsong Forest, and Zul'Drak. Where they planning on having an underground zone as well?

Sure you can, our tank did it with just Karazhan/Gruul gear

I can see Azjol-Nerub as being a huge instance, and not a zone per say. Make it a hub like Auchindoun with wings in the Old Kingdom or what have you.

Suppose that Blood, Frost, and Unholy imply function and go out on a limb here, suppose Blood is DPS, Frost is tanking, and Unholy is utility (buff?) - not terribly large a leap, since there's got to be some point to pre-combat rune slotting. If you Frost up your Rune to tank, apply your cool debuffs, and then send in a prot warrior to tank, well, that's basically two prot warriors stacking (what a nutty idea). Great when it comes to "Oh no, the boss hits hard." Sucks out loud for dodging that enrage/berserk timer.

Wings are probably the only way they're going to do instances now. It makes the dungeons much more bite sized and accessible. Remember how long a run through BRD could take?

The side effect is it makes all the instances feel like long hallways filled with trash.

There's only one question of any importance: What are they going to do about mana potions in raids?!

Unbalancing Strike hit our tank for over 40k?

I can't quite concieve of a way they can make a 2-h able to tank, without making it overpowered in PvP, that doesn't mimic either Paladin/Warrior tanking.

As far as i see it, Tanking is basically 2 things. Holding aggro, and Taking Damage. If a DK can take enough damage with a 2-H to tank a boss (with heals, of course) then the only way they can hold aggro is either:
a) with perma-taunt (each hit = auto-attack target),
b) threat modifiers similar to a Paladins (each hit has additional effect w/ extra threat)
c) a warriors (all damage = extra %threat).
d) c), but with more insta-attack, high threat, fast cooldown rune abilities

If a) is the case, pvp remains balance, PvE is unbalanced. Having a tanking class that cannot physically loose aggro is massively unbalanced.
If b) is the case, they don't deal tons of damage, but they have a very large multiplier on thier damage-to-threat, so PvP remains balanced, PvE is kinda balanced, but not really. 2-h'rs implie large damage over longer periods. Which means it takes longer for them to gain aggro.
c) is pretty much the same as b), but it would just be through normal attacks/a few specials. pvp remains balanced, pve has the same slower threat build-up.
d) is what i'm expecting if they want them to be able to tank. A whole slew of medium damage, high threat rune-based attacks. Fast rune cooldowns, or rune-stacking. Basically require only one type of rune, say Defensive Frost (if there are 6 runes, and 3 schools, i'll just assume there's an offensive/defensive for each). So you can load your Rune-sword up with 6 D/F runes, that each has a 30-second cooldown to it, which means you can use that high-threat ability every 5 seconds constantly.

Anyone else see them as an uber-offtank?

No Rage problems
No mana problems
Runes are reusable, can be fine-tuned for each encounter (multiple abilities requiring multiple runes)
So they should be able to build threat consistantly, just like if they were tanking the boss, but without the damage.
The only exception is if the runes have a very large cooldown (60+ seconds) or require multiple runes to use tanking abilities. Even then, i can't seem them not being a good offtank, similiar to a xx/xx/15 warrior build, that only goes down to extra threat defensive stance.

They should also be able to serve very well as a second OT that's DPSing, unless they require a very different gearset from DPS. Keep one or two defensive runes inscribed on your Runeblade, and put the others as offensive. Pump out some damage, and still have tanking abilities on the back-burner. Just like Feral Druids in kitty gear. Sure, their not the best tanks cause thier in DPS gear, but they can do it in a pinch.

Simple. You're forgetting the balance implied by the rune system; in a way, it could even be likened to a much stricter rage or energy system.

Basically, it's likely that a tanking DK will apply some short duration mitigation buff on itself, which will use, say, half available runes while increasing armor by 50%. And they'd have to juggle keeping their buff up and using threat abilities, since it would be all too possible to try too hard for threat, which would let the mitigation buff drop, which would be a GG.

Other options include using a tanking combo of runes to generate a personal Shadow Shell shield of some type, like Teron does during the shadowmoon posession event, possibly including something about channeling incoming heals into the shield.

There's honestly a lot of options and I can see some interesting possibilities for tanking. Possibly including making them the best tank for casters (absorb shield solution) while being marginally sub-par for all melee opponents, in the same way that Druids are supreme for "big hit" special mobs but bad for crushers and Paladins are best for dual wielders but lousy for big hit mobs like magtheridon or maulgar, while warriors contribute all their own specialty utility in exchange.

The big things I'm betting on for Death Knights will be abilities just like from Warcraft III and the current game:
Being able to eat your pets for health.
Damage Auras (think of every death knight we've had to fight in WoW - that'll be awesome for threat generation / tanking, but horrible for sheep - but gives us a second Aura Class - just with offensive instead of defensive Auras).
Possibly a Speed Aura.
Possibly that ultimate in some form (ressurecting corpses as undead in an area around you - instead of just making one or two ghouls a long cooldown to get a pile of people up for a bit).

Either way, they're likely to be interesting and different and I can think of more than a few players (fury warriors) in our guild that are going to be perfectly suited to this class (Beatrice, I'm looking at you!)

Come on, we know nothing about any sort of numbers, and they're already uber?

Taking the knowledge of "runes, doesn't use shield" and trying to speculate about how good they'll be at anything at this point is silly

I would agree in general but we certainly do have a lot of MMO precedence for how new classes tend to fare and we've also seen how Blizzard likes to handle balance over the last few years as well. Of course, even giddy speculation based on very small snippets of pre-alpha information is quite silly but we can make some slightly informed guesses if we really want to do so.

At this point though, I don't think I can do so with a straight face. I'll toss in my "see, I told you so!" token on DKs not getting properly balanced until well into the next expansion however and past history makes me think they'll be initially balanced very conservatively indeed.

That's because of the name "Hero class". It screams imbalanced. It just means "old WC3 hero unit class" but people think hero class means you press one button and everyone dies around you. That's probably why Blizzard commented once that they're not going to do hero classes as originally planned because it implies too much.

DKs will be balanced like every class at level 80, no more no less will happen.

I think that they clearly said that hero classes were meant to be "somewhat" stronger then the normal classes though..

I'm quite sure they also introduce this class to tip the balance in arena pvp in a different direction, should it go in a certain direction too much, then they've got their next hero-class ready to tip it into another direction again ..

Adding new classes is, unlike what most people think, a great way of balancing the game. Especially in Arena PvP.

This is pretty much all they said on the subject with regards to how they view the balance of the first hero class:

I just got back and glancing over the thread, I noticed that one fairly major thing from the R&D panel got missed. Tigole mentioned that they were in serious discussion about moving Naxxramas to Northrend, toning it down to "Molten Core difficulty level" and making it an initial 25-man raid zone. Judging from some of the discussion on the last couple pages, I'd imagine that that comes as good news.

Can't be, unbalancing should be top 14K, may be that was a crit, was he spamming shield block ?

Oh, guildies.

We did Naxxramas when we faced Gruul pre patch and couldn't field fully potted raids, so this was in Karazhan gear, and I only came close to dying on Razuvious once. There are many reasons why the difference can be so big, but 40 k must have been a crit.

In my opinion that would be pretty amazing.

Hell they'd have to buff a lot of the encounters to make them anything but a joke in an 80th level world.

The original Idea of BRD was that is was winged. You did the easier quests at level 52 and only did part then you came back at 57 or whatever and did the emperor. Unfortunately players never played it like this so they started physically seperating the dungeon ala dire maul.

I miss the big sprawling dungeons. Though part of it is they gave much better opportunities for excessive kiting

Please. For the love of god, let it be true. God.