Bugged glancing blows in conjunction with ridiculous 2h WF scaling since it's not normalized with a class that uses a resource based on damage dealt which scales on top of this would pretty much explain the problem here.
Just imagine a cleave fight where every WW connect can potentially proc WF in combination with a very efficient way to dump your excess rage via cleave.
Glancings have been fixed for weeks now, and Chero said it never affected raid encounters, WW doesn't proc WF (and apparently never has here) unless that has been fixed.
That being said I picked up a deathbringer last week and spent some time hitting dummies, with and without flurry, no deep wounds specced at all. I was only wearing a mainhand weapon.
I've heard several people say that Deathbringer is providing them with more DPS in mainhand than crul is, which sounds weird to me, since I did a bunch of math and everything suggests that the extra white DPS and heroic strike DPS from crul should make it the superior mainhand weapon.
Every single test was somewhere between 1000 and 1500 melee swings and every single test deathbringer did more white swing dps than Crul, which correct me if I'm wrong should be down right impossible given that crul flat out has more DPS and there were not WWs and OPs to skew the result.
The proc was not the cause of the extra DPS either. It amounted to about 1-1.5 dps.
The average swing damage of the weapons ended up at exactly what it should when calculated from weapon damage range and AP and most tests were within .2% dodge to eachother, with crul usually being in the favor here. The constant outlier was that deathbringer consistently had too much crit with one test being near 7% too much and most others being somewhere around 2-3% while crul constantly landed right around the correct amount of crit. I'll do a proper test soon with a lot more swings to get more accuracy.
It could simply just be rng.
But then I bought a 1.4 speed dagger with 7.1 DPS and a 3.5 speed 2h sword with 7.1 DPS
I ended up with:
1.4 speed dagger: 87.5 white swing DPS 26.6% crit 5.9% dodge
3.5 speed sword: 96.8 white swing DPS 26.5% crit 5.7% dodge
Not a single special ability was used, and both weapons should yield the same DPS, or very close to when accounting for small variances like dodges and crits.
I have to admit I'm in deep water here, because I am seeing absolutely no reason why these two slower weapons should beat the faster ones in white swing DPS. If I have a glaring hole of missing knowledge I would very much like to have that pointed out before my hair goes gray trying to figure out why I am getting these results.