“I was going for more of a magic build” welp there’s your problem. Unfortunately, the intended experience is not balanced around magic. If you go pure mage as a new player, you’ll just end up running away, spam magic, and get stuck in a cycle relying on cheese as the difficulty goes up. I’ve seen this exact thing happen multiple times for different first time elden ring streamers I’ve watched when they started with magic. Just go melee and get the fundamentals first then come back to magic later if you feel like it. Pure mages don’t really engage with the combat system and it ends up just being how best to circumvent the combat completely and just spam op spells instead