In my own playthrough, I decided to give in and finally try out the Moonveil katana, what with me being Int and all. And...turns out it's pretty good, like everyone says! It's definitely stronger than my bastard's stars flail (sadface?), but I dunno if I'm quite as sold on sticking to it. I leveled an uchigatana a bit to try some dual-wielding, though honestly that one's not clicking with me as much as the lone katana. I leveled up Rogier's rapier and think I'll do the same for my frost needle and try those out too. Might also bring back the claws, because if I'm going to drop my defenses to two-hand against enemies, I might as well get vicious with it. Who knows! Maybe I'll just put the best ash of war ever, the lightning ram, on my nightrider flail and go nuts.
Hitting the plateau has been a bit discouraging, in that more and more of the stuff I find and fight is just kicking my ass. I've leveled up vigor a bunch, and a bit of endurance for heavier armor, but these assholes are still two-shotting me. This was supposed to be my git gud run, and I did solo my first two shardbearers and only used the provided summons for Radahn, so that's going OK I suppose. But honestly, shit like the catacomb watchdogs, black knife assassins, magma wyrms et al are absolutely bodying me and I'm just not having fun with them. I keep falling back on spirit summons and blasting them with sorcery because I dread the very idea of trying to solo them for some obscure honor-badge reason I don't even care about. It clicked with me last night, and I realized that most of my least favorite bosses for the completely usual boss-hating reasons are also the ones that repeat the most often, which is kind of a shitty realization to come to. Talk about an unfortunate one-two of un-fun design.
I still think the quantity and breadth of content is overall excellent in theory, especially for a first-time play, but on future NG plays (if any exist) I imagine I will have less and less patience for bullshit, only setting foot in mini-dungeons that have something I need specifically for the build and bailing on the boss if it doesn't *also* have something I need, and freely summoning anything I want to get it done. I'd say I'll still fight them for the runes, but honestly, I find that the mini-dungeon bosses usually kinda give shit for runes anyway. This is not how I've done replays of any of the previous games, for the record, I usually just play through the entire game again without skipping or cheesing things. Though this is also kinda way huge to do that with. (And yet here I am...)