Shoot—I did not notice that Blizzard didn’t want to add new equipment. Too bad; I’d invested a bunch of effort into a 2H+Shield Ret/Prot hero spec that I got some good feedback on!
I’d have expected that a Duelist hero spec (that’s what I’m tentatively calling this) would end up having some kind of active ability that makes use of the dagger, probably something that replaces Shield Slam for Prot and maybe Raging Blow for Fury, and it’d need to either build or spend some passive effects that the tree would have. I’m not sure what passives, though—I’ve not thought that far.
I see what you mean about the stats—there’d need to be something in Duelist that compensates for the lost armor for sure, and the devs would need to make daggers provide +str alongside +agi and +int—either that, or add some passive that causes +agi from gear to count as +str.
The thing about Duelist is that its flavor is using weapons to fight and protect yourself in a somewhat-unusual way; I could kind of see a Blood/Frost DK hero spec use the concept, now that I think about it; it’d emphasize martial prowess over magic a bit, but I suppose that’s the kind of customization that a hero spec ought to allow. I gravitated towards warriors as Duelists because I figured focusing on weapons was more Warrior-flavored than anything else.
This’d certainly count for Protection; I’d expect Fury would have a dagger in the offhand and a 2H in the main-hand, though 1H wouldn’t necessarily need to be ruled out.