It's mediocre, but it's mediocre against everything. If there's ever a level with every single type of monster in equal proportions, then Normal will rule for people who do not have weapon slots - it's the poor man's weapon.
If you have weapon slots, then Normal damage is useless.

It was your first time bringing the blade, so it's presumably level 1. The difference between a level 1 weapon and a level 10 one is quite a lot in terms of damage. I imagine the level 10 blade should be doing well over 200 per hit on undead. That's what the wiki tells me, at least, comparing to the areas where WRH would be doing 500 on the charge attack.

Let's pick out some damage numbers from WRH, actually. At the beginning of stratum 6, they look like so:
322 on effective, 241 on neutral, 49 on resistant.

Meanwhile, here's CIV:
213 on undeads, 177 on everything else.

Normal damage has little to do with it. CIV just has weaker hits than WRH because WRH is a heavy sword. Let's make-believe WRH to have identical neutral damage to CIV, using the same ratios:
236 on weak, 177 on neutral, 36 on resistant.

As you can see, our fake-WRH would be a bit stronger than actual-CIV on undead, but it would also be (and even currently is) a whole lot weaker against beasts and gremlins.

It's a choice. OOO wants you to spent thousands of CE on crafting weapons geared for each enemy type, but you could simply go for one set of normal damage weapons and never have to worry about it again. I certainly can't think of anything I wouldn't be able to do with Triglav / Pepperbox / Nitronome. It may kill things a teensy-tinesy amount slower than Divine / Alchemer / DCB // Faust / Umbra / DR // Flourish / Blitz / DBB, but I would only have spent 30% of the CE of that guy, so he deserves being 30% more effective than me at all times, I think.

If only there were some kind of guide, with a detailed analysis of swords by damage type. Then people could choose the right swords of the right damage types, and avoid the weaker swords, which might possibly include all of the normal swords. Well, we can dream.

Normal weapons are for people who don't coordinate multiple damage types. For example, a knight plays with one sword and one gun, and wants the flexibility of using either one on any monster. Or maybe the knight owns only one sword and one gun, and doesn't plan to buy more, because all of his profits are being funneled to an alt. Or maybe the player is just ignorant. Or maybe he's focused on Vanaduke's mask.

For what it's worth, non-normal damage types have much larger resistance penalties than vulnerability bonuses. If there weren't this asymmetry, then normal weapons would be even less attractive. In other words, the asymmetry is a step toward making normal weapons competitive with non-normal ones.

In the end, Three Rings wants us to craft a lot of specialized equipment, because this drives CE sales and hence company revenue. I don't think you'll ever see truly strong normal weapons. That would make the game less financially viable, and less interesting.

Yes! Batabii agrees with Tabby.

@kitty
completely true

but the 1 thing i hate is how really useless normal weps are because you have 2 wep slots by default, so i could have lets say, BTB for peeing dmg and glacius for elemental dmg, obviously my weps makes me get super effectives on beast, fiends, undead, and constructs. beast resist elemanetal, but my BTB is what backs up my glacius from being less efficient with beast. slimes resist piercing, but elemental is neutral to slimes, so i do neutral dmg to them, and normal weps are neutral all the way and monsters dont have defense (excluding weakness and thats technically not having defense at all) so its not like LD that every skolver resist piercing and normal, so i say they should really make normal weps do ALOT more dmg due to how useless they are in LD (pure normal and not split normal)

"While I would like to ask about peeing damage"