Weapons are harder to figure out. (Why I originally left it alone, but seeing as no one else has attempted I figure I'll give it a try)
There are many more factors to consider with weapons that include your character and your style of fighting and your other equipment and your skills and the monster you are fighting. The dev team has done a great job of leveling the board on most weapons and each have its advantages and disadvantages.
So let me point out some things to consider.
First, you still have that strength requirement thing so be wary of that.
Then of course you have the skill of the weapon, be it swords, fencing, etc.
There is a property called use best weapon skill that will allow you to try out some weapons that are not in your skill set but if it doesn't have this property, the skill set can be limiting. You also have a property called mage weapon that allows you to use your magery skill as the weapon skill usually with a small penalty (up to 29 points) to the skill.
Then you have one-handed vs two handed. One handed weapons are good for characters that like shields or like to chug potions. Two handed weapons are good for bushido characters as they get an increased chance to parry with those. Again this goes into style and your character. It is not a deal breaker when you find a good weapon but if you are shopping for a nice weapon you of course would want to consider this.
Now also considering the weapon type, you will find certain groups have certain benefits over others. For example, Maces do an extra damage of 3 to 5 points to the victims stamina if a hit is made. Maces also do damage to armor everytime the armor absorbs damage. Axes gain a bonus from lumberjacking.
OK that gets us through some ofthe preliminaries. Now lets look at just the weapon comparisons before we get into additional magic properties and elemental damage types and slayer weapons etc.
Speed is one of the most sought after objectives in weapons. It translates directly into what they call DPS or damage per second. This can be a convulated thing to figure out but luckily stratics has a nice calculator
http://uo.stratics.com/content/arms-armor/arms.php You will find what base weapon suits your character best. Note that it might be different for every character depending on many factors. Also that calculator assumes you are at 100% stamina and it might be different for the same character if he loses stamina fast etc.
But this is only the tip of the iceberg for weapons comparison.
The next thing many people consider is the special move. After trying all the special moves see what suits you and your game play. I personally like the whirlwind attack on my weapons as I am constantly found in the middle of 8 monsters and want to deal them all damage.
Ok so have I confused you enough yet on all your choices.
No? Well lets get into damage types.
Against a person with 0 in every armor class area, it doesn't matter what type of damage your weapon puts out, physical, fire, cold, whatever. But of course we don't go against monsters or people with no armor. Each monster you are fighting usually has a weakness, for example undead are prone to fire damage more than any other type. So if you are fighting undead, and are comparing two swords with everything else equal, take the 1 with more fire damage than say physical. Of course if you are fighting a daemon fire damage does you less good than poison damage. So basically a weapons damage type can only be used in a comparison if you plan to only fight a certain type of monster with them.
Thoroughly confused yet?
I will let you digest this, while I compose myself and see if I can explain all the different weapon properties such as slayer property and hit spell properties and hit area properties etc.
