The general rule of the weapons are like this:
- Swords: Balanced weapons in terms of offensive and defensive power
- Axe: Generally focused on dealing more damage at the expense of defensive power
- Clubs: Generally more defensive power (with exceptions) than offensive.
All of these have different prices (and in different servers some are more expensive than others, example: in lober the axes are dirty cheap, clubs are dirty cheap, some swords too, but generally the expensive are swords)
Now, according to tibia.wikia.com if you want to have high damage and good defensive use one handed weapon that have defense modifier, in example:
As you can see the def says : 33 +3 that means that if you have a shield
The defense would be 40 + 3 giving you a total of 43.
Therefore I would choose an axe since they tend to have more attack and less defense but still having defense modifiers, so you can get the bonus defense to a good shield.
Hope the explanation helps