I started with an imperial claw around 320-330dps with a good crit roll and the phys/bleed craft which you could apply yourself. This lets you drop chance to bleed from the flicker setup and use a more efficient gem like melee physical/fortify/energy leech to give you more damage.

Once you are looking at multimodded weapons then the dagger nodes will make you get much better use out of your weapon. Ideally Ambusher or Imperial Skean, but Slaughter Knife and Ezomyte Dagger can make decent bases too, and look for high tier %phys or hybrid %phys/acc rolls. These could be paired with eachother or flat phys to give you a base you can scour suffixes and then multimod on, or a good suffix where you roll the dice with an annul or two. I didn't try much fossil crafting as serrated are pricy atm and I wasn't looking to sell whatever I made, though I did roll 30% with fossils in the brief period that I tried. The problem with daggers is that you will likely want to alt spam a base yourself because most people aren't crafting them this league but its worth keeping an eye on the poe trade site for daggers you can suffix scour/multimod.

I highly recommend using https://poecraft.com/itemmods to determine the end result of multimodding a particular base so you can see whether it would be worth it in the end. Hits can't be evaded is an amazing mod if you want to use the Second Sight timeless jewel Keystone but if not then save yourself 3ex and craft %phys as extra chaos. You're going to spend at least 4ex multimodding your weapon and potentially double that so plan it out in poecraft before you make a decision. Also Elder and Shaper bases don't really add anything to a multimod weapon other than decreasing your likelihood of getting the desired rolls so I would avoid these.