Heya,
depends on your playstyle actually. But mostly, the basic weapon damage isn’t that important at the beginning, even as a melee-character, because you have sockets in your armor, wich allow you to increase your melee-damage with rings furthermore.
The damage of your weapon is also unnecessary, if you aren’t even using melee-combat-arts. Especially for beginners, a dwarf with the flamethrower-skill for example is extremely strong, since it melts tons of enemies in lower levels (becomes a bit weaker in higher levels, but is still playable) without effort. You can combine it with cannon blast, too. To optimize these skills, you don’t want more weapon damage, but better stats on your weapon/shield.
For your first characters, you should just focus on a few skills and optimize them. It’s important to find the balance between damage/skill-level and cooldown.
Good luck and have fun in Ancaria ;)