I don’t know what I’m doing but at least I’m having fun. I’d only been playing an hour or 2 a few nights a week. Yesterday I took the day off and played for like 12 hours. I beat margit, got to godrick, got him down super low once but haven’t gotten close since. I need to + my gear, but Im having trouble finding smithing (1). I have a ton of (2) and up. I rolled a bandit and I kind of regret it. Being that close is hectic, plus I don’t know where to spec other than dex and vigor.
Go do more open world stuff and you'll find tons of smithing stones. If you can find Mines specifically the stones grow on the walls, they'll look like gold crystals. You can also purchase them from the Nomadic merchants throughout Limgrave, I think almost all of them should sell level 1 stones. They actually just put a new patch out last night that's supposed to make them drop more and be sold at more places early game.
Nothing wrong with bandit and all melee players are going to be up close anyways. It also starts with a bow and arrow so you can take advantage of that if you want distance but you'll also need to level the bow up if you want to do decent damage.
If you're fighting Godrick your weapon should be +3 at the very least if not more. What weapon are you using? Need to look and see what it scales off of primarily to see if you should be putting damage into strength too or not.
Vigor is going to be extremely important as it's going to stop you from getting one-shotted, also Endurance, that's going to let you get more hits in and still have stamina to dodge out of the way after. After that you'll want to prioritize dex and strength most likely but it's mostly going to depend on what weapons you use and what sort of build/playstyle you want to do. Bleed is extremely powerful right now so anything you have that applies bleed and scales with arcane is going to be good. Pumping up arcane will increase bleed effect on items that apply it or scale with it.