I have to admit, I am a club boy,
For me there is littl eto no reason to use a dagger unless you are going for a ohko build with the iridium needle/are lucky to get a broken trident really early on and swords are reliable but slow and tedious to wait around for while the serpent or iridium bat I just hit goes careening away just to come back again.
Clubs are just easy, the clubs you get early game are way better than the swords you can get, take for example the wooden club or if you are lucky, a wooden mallet, whearas a sword user may use the steel smallsword which deals 4-8 damage a club user may be using the wood club which deals 9-16 and way more if you can abuse the special attack well (I, with using the attack key on keyboard and left mouse click can usually get abou 7-9 hits in the time it takes for the special attack to wear off) which in turn will allow you to have it as a viable weapon much longer than a sword and can keep you from having to go out of your way to buy/grind crates for a better weapon.
The wooden club for me was a useful weapon until about floor 50 and then again at floors 70-90 because of the skeletons there being so weak.
Mid-late game the club-type weapon is also superior personally because of the massive output of damage coupled with the ways to lower special attack cooldown making the special attack the only one you actually use.
*slight spoilers
My weapon evolution as I progressed went similar to this with the approx. amount of time used (in game) beside it:
1/2 day/rusty sword
1-2 weeks/wooden mallet (lucky)
3 weeks/yeti tooth (I always get this from crates and it is way better than the obsidian edge)
2 weeks/galaxy sword (eh)
8 weeks/galaxy hammer (good weapon, now just lies in a chest with all my collectable weapons)
~1 year/Dragontooth club (one of the best looking weapons in my opinion and second best hammer)
1/3 year and counting/Infinity gavel (I was unsure whether to upgrade as I liked my previous weapon immensly and I am a pretty nostalgic person but decided to anyway)
1/3 year and counting/slammer* (I really just like the slammer as a weapon and I like to fight the more powerful dangerous creatures with a weaker weapon for fun and to practise for when I am on newer files)
*Spoilers (though if you are on this thread you are just asking to know...)
If you do choose to use the club as a weapon, there are a few builds that will maxsimise its potential:
Pure damage:
With a build that focuses on pure damage, you will ideally have an Infinity Gavel with three ruby enchants, two iridium/ruby forged rings and the combat perks for extra damage.
With all these percenatge bonuses you get an insane 95% extra damage (the game counts damage boosts all together then adds) and makes your gavel do 195-234 damage per hit which is nearly enough to one-hit mummies in the mines.
for this build I would reccomned using Artful but crusader will allow you to near garunteed one hit mummies (255 minumum damage to the undead, the mummies health is 260).
Pure speed and special attack:
For this build you will need the same weapon as the last but enchanted with three emeralds (speed) with the artful enchant and acrobat perk which will allow you to do each special attack at 25% the regular wait and attack faster.
You will also want emerald rings for speen and iridium bands (which you cannot go wrong with in a build like this)
Though some testing I have come across the hypothesis that higher speed does in-fact help when spamming the special attack on hammers though I may be wrong which would be nice to know.
Of course, these are extreme examples and I do not reccomend doing them and instead using a good mixture of the two with your own choices for rings and forges (though I would try to use iridium bands), these are just placeholders and are meant as a good place to build off of when making your own build that suits you.
My old build was the dragontooth club forged with one speed and two weight and enchanted with artful because I liked letting the monsters go away for a while and letting me mine away then hit them again and had no damage boosting rings. (damage and extra health perks)
Right now, my build is the infinity gavel triple forged with ruby (attack) and enchanted with artful as well as having acrobat for the way faster cooldown and my own fav ring combos which includes one iridium band.
As a kind of summary, do what you will and use weapons you like, if you like clubs, do feel free to take from this what you will and have a good day.
*I am also a person who likes doing useless things and collecting what I like and have started a collection of rare/cool weapons which includes 8 dark swords, all of the dragontooth weapons, three dwarf hammers and a dwarf dagger, neptunes glave, and some others. I have also fully enchanted and forged the starter weapon (rusty sword) with haymaker and 30+ weight to mess around and other things of the like.
