First, the primary factor in how much damage you do is your critical rate. A critical hit does anywhere from 2-4 times the damage of a normal hit. The more criticals you get the faster the mob dies and the faster you gain exp. Daggers have the highest natural critical rate.
Attack Speed - Daggers have the fastest attack speed in the game. That combined with massive critical chance and you get massive damage.
Some characters aren't as good with daggers due to low accuracy. You can + your DEX to make yourself more effective with one.
The good thing about dagger users is mostly that the dagger is the fastest weapon in the game and has a high crit rate. Daggers also have good evasion meaning that it wont hurt them that much when they are in light armor.
And yes Bounty Hunters are the best money makers at early levels.
You may have to wait longer then 14 mins to get a response....
But Daggers are proberbly officially the new FoTM class going by the hype people are putting up, and the amount of people rerolling Daggers again.
Bounty Hunters do make good money, ignore the dwarfs who say they dont, they are just trying to get attention and whine about how they get no money, when they really just suck at making it ^^
I have a lvl 60 Abyss Walker and I can tell you that dagger is one of the most enjoyable classes out there. I also have a nuker and a Tank and the dagger is just so much more fun to lvl and grp with. Daggers have fast kill speeds, VR = god mode because the mob never catches up with your HP regen from crits, and their specials are very nice.
I currently use a dagger on my Battle Prophet because of it's fast hits & crit damage, also since I have my own buffs, the shield helps protection when the mobs do get a hit on me :)
any class can use a dagger. i remember the days of C1 when all the bots had a Cursed Maingauche and manticore set. this was when C grade weapons were 40M +
daggers in general are fast little buggers. the Special Abilities of them are very useful even outside of dagger classes. many overlords, battle prophets, SE's and EE and even dwarves can benefit from the guidance, focus, mana up, and magic SA that there are to choose from.
and with the Bows and Polearm nerfs in C5 to healers, daggers and fists will be the new weapons of choice.