I go through 1-3 daggers to kill anyone and their weapons are usually broken after combat, with weapon repair reducing durability it seems I NEED to have a caster just to save equipment durability for harder enemies. Any tips? 

edit: Also noticed- spellcasting is reducing weapon durability - bug or expected?

Ability usage, including spellcasting, uses weapon durability as well. Most abilities benefit from stronger weapons for damage calculation.

You can either get more damage from stats (dex for daggers physical damage) or craft more weapons for replacement, although if it takes up to 3 daggers for a single kill it seems your damage might be too low.

Yeah, early game is a bit too hard on some of the weaker starting classes. I'll try to fine-tune the builds. Right now I'm pretty much on dumping everything into main stat and hope it's enough.