They’re a weapon I’d love to love.

The first thing to accept is that the Whirlwind blades are not an all-purpose weapon. They excel against targets with lots of hitpoints who can be staggered, so you can take full advantage of the “whirlwind” attack. Their issue is, the early strikes to get a combo going seem to miss often, so I think there’s something not quite right in the way the blades connect to NPCs. So it’s pretty easy to interrupt the combo before you get it running.

Anything that doesn’t stagger will hit you back while the blender is running, and we don’t want that. And things that don’t stagger but that have low hitpoints are faster to kill with other weapons.

So, in my opinion, they are a niche weapon that don’t usually justify bringing along, because the job they do well isn’t something other, more general-purpose weapons (including daggers), could not.