Game advice

Hey, I'm working with a side scroller in SDL... things are flowing pretty smoothly, enemy behavior, levels, object interactions, but I'm now working to add 30 new weapons to the game. I first thought about a weapon class, but realized each weapon would have different characteristics. I am not quite sure if I should make a weapon class with common variables then make a subclass for each of the 30 weapons, but that didn't really make sense to me because I'd never use the weapon class by itself so it almost seemed useless. I haven't done any subclasses yet so I'm not familiar with how they are defined called ect. The only other option I see is just creating 30 individual classes. I thought about also making these only called within the character class attack function, but it might be useful to use in other ways... say equiping enemies/bosses with any of the 30 weapons later if I want. Any opinions on how you would impliment this? I dont' really need code examples (unless you want to show me an example of creating a subclass lol), I'm just looking for tips of the best direction to start in so I don't write a ton of code and decide its useless when I'm done lol. Thanks again for your time.