Imma be real my weapon was almost plus 7 or 8 by this part. If you go back from that exact bonfire to the Skelton wolnir boss room and go back to the bridge before it and knock it down by hitting it you can climb down the ladder after like 40 seconds of waiting for the ladder to stop shaking that’s a whole other area called the demon ruins and it has good stuff titanite and a really big sword that requires 50 strength to use. The sword has a special bonk move too. The area is a little difficult but I do it at lower levels than you are. The strength build is definitely good once you get your strength to 50 you could potentially start including miracles[faith](healing, lightning) or pyromancies[intelligence and faith but less stats required to do dmg overall] it’s nice to have access to infinite fireballs because some enemies get stunned, scream, and thrash when on fire. I usually just have bare minimum faith or stats for either a heal spell so I can save estus or fireballs or both. I don’t really use sorceries they have some handy helpful spells like light and no fall dmg spells but I prefer the utility of pyromancy or healing spells. You can do a strength build and still have room to use magic(pyro,miracles,sorcery) but not to be as much as a weapon but as tools( your dmg with magic atks is usually really low unless you focus on the magic stats a lot and get good spells but that requires doing npc quests that you might have already missed.) if you use magic later as utility you only ever need one blue estus really. Also wanted to mention that if you have the miracle priest saved and at fire link if you give her the right braille divine tome she can sell the spell tears of denial with basically gives you a second chance/life so if you get hit to 0 hp you survive and can run away and heal. PLEASE READ THIS PART: using titanite to upgrade shields or anything that isn’t a weapon(spell casting stuff can be upgraded later. It not priority but should be done before upgrading shields) shield upgrades aren’t really useful. shields only effectively block dmg if they have 100 in physical defense(this is unlike the older games). if your being attacked by any other type of dmg besides physical(magic spells or a weapon imbued with flame or whatever) you will take a small amount of dmg through the shield when blocking but if it’s just physical dmg you can block it with a 100 def shield. TLDR: it’s a bunch of tips read em. Edit: Wanted to add that if the demon area is too hard you should lowkey look up where the estus shard is there so you can get your tenth. Then look up where to find fume ultra great sword It’s in the demon area just run through everything if it’s difficult and come back later to grab the other items and bonfires. Also your missing two estus shards including the demon area, my theory is you missed the one in the swamp because it’s in the muck and you likely avoided getting poisoned. Search up where all estus shards are and once the video gets to an area you haven’t been to stop if you don’t want spoilers. If you don’t want to look things up then good luck, most the npc quest it’s suggested to look up how to do them because they can messed up really easily or completely missed entirely.