What is the general consensus on this debate because I've heard much confliction? There are people that swear by their hard hitting staves and just as many Monks I've seen swear by using two handwrap type weapons for the crit bonus.

What do YOU think does more damage, and why? Personally, I'm using Zank and I really don't feel like the damage coming from it is all that significant and I'm fairly tempted to try to find some strong claws to use instead. I'd just like a little clarification as to what weapon set up is currently better from one of you higher level monks out there.

It's really a question of style and which weapons you have availible.
Since finishers is what actually produces most damage (and while individual skills can pass them pending weaponry, they are cheap and the chains are a neat boost), crits are important.

If you assume a base of 15% critrate (dexterity + various critgear).
This would give 15% critrate with two-hander, 22.5% with fists, 40% with tiger and a twohander (assuming you're 30-49, which most would be still), and 47.5% with tiger and fists.

Going from two-hander to fists without tiger means uping your critrate by 50%.
Going from two-hander to fists with tiger means uping your critrate by ~18%.
The more buffs (in particular crit enhancing) you recieve, the less diffrence between using fists and two-hander is. This dosen't take into effect some abilities which appears to have a higher-than-normal critrate (Cresent Kick and Ashen Hand apperently - not adding our forced abilties here, 5 minutes reuse makes them unreliable at best) which again works in the favour of the two-handed style.
The higher base critrate you have, the less actual effect you get from using fists.

Another very important factor is that most of our fistweapons appear to be designed without the non-stop of autoattack damage when using specials in mind - they are simply way to fast. Like Chunli suggested in another thread, we need "longsword/axe" eqvivalient one-handed weapons (converting one or two of the multitude of fist varations shouldn't be that much of an issue on could imagne...) to make dualwield a more viable option.
Speed is a disadvantage on weapons - fast weapons needs to swing a lot on autoattack to make up for all the lost damage from specials. This becomes more and more glaring obvious the higher your strength is. A slow two-hander with high strength is a force of destruction compared to equally leveled fist weapons (assuming using same weapon main and offhand, main+1/2 off should be approxmitly the same leveled weapon btw, you can't add them both up fully) - while at low strength dualwield and two-hander might seem pretty equal in damage.

However, if you have superior fistweapons and a bad (or even decent) two-hander(s), you should of course use them. Or if you're simply tired of using leftover christmas decorations. ~

WTB a Shaolin Spade,   anyone? anyone?   Two handers for life!