Sorry for multipost, this reply wasn't up when I did the previous one.

As I said in the intro, all instant strike scaling is normalized (has been for a very long time) so the modifier for attack power (which is basically what you're referring to) is the same for any weapon speed, it is in fact just the average damage on the weapon that makes all the difference for us when it comes to weapon speed.

I have found the real culprit of the random blood/death rune if you blood strike 2 times in a row too fast it will convert one blood rune into a death rune twice. Try to stagger the second blood strike by a split second, you can wait till the rune converts to a death rune and usually you wont lose too much but that is for sure why it happens.

You should start by reading the first post in this thread. This, along with a lot of other information, is already laid out.

I am still unsure that you are calculating this correctly. Perhaps you could explain this to me more clearly.

Using -average- calculations:

How is 80% of 295 + 467.2 (or 703.2) going to do more damage than 80% of 424.5 +467.2 (or 806.8)?

Lets ignore averages, and assume max strike modifiers

80% of 384 + 467.2
equals 774.4

80% of 552 + 467.2
equals 908.8

This is -without- a contribution of AP. To my understanding, Our strikes are all based off your damage on the initial strike which is then modified by AP. My numbers are based on individual weapon strike damage without that modification. Speed and AP have no impact on this comparison at all apart from the fact that we are comparing a faster weapon with a lower strike damage to a slower weapon with a higher strike damage. But in the end, all that matter is what those strike damages are.

Is there something I am missing? Please help me understand what you mean by normalization of the AP modifier (when I am not using an AP modifier at all). To be quite honest, my thought process reflects my in game results. Has your math applied in game confirmed your conclusions? If you are correct (which I am not convinced of yet), then we have been misleading people in this thread for quite some time and I think as a community we should ensure that is -not- the scenario.

The main point you're missing is that if you add in the AP the base weapon difference becomes realtively small.

Both fast and slow 1H get the same contribution from AP to their strikes (which is only fair since the amount of strikes you can do is independant from weapon speed).
So while it may be true that without AP the slower weapon does about 125 damage more (about 15% more).
When you add AP the numbers get upped with a static amount of damage, lets say you get 1500 damage extra from AP.
Suddenly the numbers are ~2250 for fast vs 2375 for slow. Still about 125 damage difference, but no longer a 15%, but rather a 5% increase.

If you add on top that white dps (and necrosis) is still a large factor and the gap between slow and fast is smaller than you might think at first.

However, slow is still WAY better. I haven't really read the theorycrafting of the last page yet (i need some sleep now, so maybe i will tomorrow).
But you (poster of the theorycraft) can not claim that we should ignore simulator results. If we do that we might as well abandon this thread since 95% of all data processed here comes directly from the simulator.
I'm personally extremely confident in its abilities, and is less likely to make calculation errors or something than theorycrafting. Granted all the number crunching happens non-transparant, but you could skim through the code.

The simulator indicated that for each 0.1 speed equals about 5 weapon dps. (Personally not very fond if this equation as weapon speed is not a "dps stat"; average damage and dps are. But it's easier to work with, that is true)
So according to that data if you go for a 1.5 speed weapon instead of a 2.6 one, it has to do 5x11=55 more dps.
So the fast CC has that over the rare rep weapons, ill give you that. But the AT weapon (from the crusader tokens), should be better.

Glancing blows only affect white swings - a yellow hit will never be a glancing blow. Deathchill only applies to yellow attacks. If you weren't specifically referring to doomtusk's post, then looking at the wowwiki attack table article, it theorizes that the order is miss->dodge->parry->glance->block->crit->crush->regular hit. So if this theory is correct, glances can never be reduced - additional crit rating past the "crit cap" would be wasted.

Glancing (heh) at a Loatheb log, one rogue did 27.2% glancing with 57.2% crit and 5.7% hit with white melee swings, with an armory melee crit rate of ~40%. I would guess that the hits came from the intervals when the rogue didn't have the 50% crit buff, but regardless, having a ~90% crit rate (actually more since armory doesn't have raid buffs) apparently had no affect on the glance rate. The specific rate was 27.2%, rather closer to the theorized 24% rate than the 0-10% rate (depending on raid buffs) that the order of crit->glance would theorize. While the one I looked at was a small sample size of 283 swings, I would say it's reasonably certain that glancing comes before crit on the attack table.

Not necessarily a good thing.
Simulators are needed when too many things interact with each other, but you cannot derive rules from a simulator that you haven't already fed it, you can only make assumptions.

Qualified decisions in gear should be based on a basic understanding of how things work, a simulator is not the best substitute for that. We can present the results of our research and simulator work and others can make their decisions based on that, but if we leave the theorycrafting just to the guys "skimming through the code", then we are just throwing different setups at the simulator and present our results here without really knowing how they came to be.

If something behaves differently than anticipated then I want to know why, I can use a simulator to "prove" that it's the case, but I still want to know the reason and the simulator cannot provide that in many cases.

Take for instance a couple pages back the simulation results that suggested that Grim Toll is more than 4 times as good as Comet from Algalon25, that just can't be right, a little mistrust should be in order me thinks.

edit:
Only white attacks obviously.

I probably used the wrong wording, I don't care that much whether crit is capped through glancing, since that realistically never occurs, but rather:
If I have a 30% crit rate, will the glancing hits reduce that to ~22% by cutting off 27%? If I interpret your results correctly, the answer would be yes, but just for confirmation since it didn't seem 100% clear.

@direddyre: Firstly, normalization only affects AP scaling, IE the forumla to calculate an Obliterate's damage is (AP/14*2.4+weapon damage)*25% assuming two diseases. The 2.4 in the parenthesis is the normalized number, instead of the weapon's actual speed.

Secondly, looking at current parses, strike based mechanics fill up roughly 50-60% of our damage (Obliterate, Blood Strike, Plague Strike, BCB, Frost Strike) while white attacks do around 25%. I don't see how it would be a DPS upgrade to boost white dps when strikes do twice as much of our damage and are heavily reliant on weapon speed due to the multipliers involved.

The haste formula is
multiplier=1/(1+percent/100)

I have 6.11% personal haste, with 5% from IIT that would be 11.11% haste if it stacked additive, or 1.0611 x 1.05 = 11.41% if it stacked multiplicative.

1/(1 + (11.11/100)) = 0.9000
1/(1 + (11.41/100)) = 0.8975

applied to a 2.6 speed weapon, that's

2.34 or 2.3335, my listed weapon speed 2.33, so you are apparently correct, thanks.

I have redone some calculations with the following corrections: added increased haste, added glancing blows, assuming that crits can become glancing and crit chance is thus reduced by glancing chance and I added 3% crit from Annihilation to specials that I simply forgot.

I don't want to edit the main post so people know what the things written here are about, so I'll just write the new results:

Assuming 40% haste (for simplicity) we get 1.79 dps per weapon dps (without BCB, 2.01 with BCB) and assuming full subversion we get new values of 2.72 for obliterate, 1.06 for BS, 0.90 for PS and 1.76 assuming now 60% for FS, I still don't know if that's a reasonable number, but it's higher than the previous one at least, even if you consider Annihilation. Totalling that makes 1.05 instead of 1.02 per avg weapon dmg.

For the example in question, [Lionhead Slasher] vs [Grimhorn Crusher], 78 avg dmg vs 53.4 dps, we now get 81.9 dps increase vs 95.59 dps loss, [Lionhead Slasher] still has a comfortable lead.
That is correct, did I state anything different?
Going by percentages of damage is not an adequate way of understanding this.

If you want an "easy" way of understanding, consider this:
On a very basic level, in order for 1 point of weapon damage to be equal to 1 point of dps, you would need to strike every second, but you don't. The higher percentages of strikes has 2 reasons:
1. They scale better with AP, you strike more than once every 2.4 secs, but AP treats it as a 2.4 sec hit, this has absolutely no impact on the calculation per weapon dmg point.
2. Strikes have static modifiers, people tend to underestimate those since they don't scale, but let me assure you that +1000 static damage to obliterate is very significant especially for DW, again this does not influence the calculation.

Obviously, trying to find the exact numbers after considering this is exactly what I wanted to do.

While the 1001 number may be static, the 25% bonus from two diseases isn't, and also you have several talents increasing ability damage by varying percentages (Black Ice, Glacier Rot, Blood of the North, Tundra Stalker and Merciless Combat to some extent). Nearly all stike mechanics also have a 2.45 crit modifier due to Guile of Gorefiend, as well as Obliterate having 15% extra crit chance from Rime (Obliterate 24% and Blood Strike 9% extra if you have Subversion also).

The discussion isn't which scales better with AP, you come off as if white attacks scale better with weapon DPS than strikes scale with weapon damage.

Okay, I've read through your post and started working on some math on my own to double check, but halfway through I noticed something. Have you taken the fact that all strikes swing with both hands in your calculations?

Edit: You also missed Glacier Rot modifier for Frost Strike.