My build to finish the game which has worked out very well for me:
My stats are something like this:
30 vigor
25 mind
30 Dex
50 Arcane
18 Int (to cast rock throw and glintstone pebble)
Enough faith to use Rotten breath encant (maybe 18?)
Base level stamina/endurance/strength
18 Int
Rivers of Blood katana. The corpse piler weapon skill just does a ridiculous amount of damage. Physical, fire and bleed damage so it’s basically effective against anything. Main weapon damage scales with Dex and bleed damage scales with ARC
Albinauric Staff - this staff changes your sorceries from scaling with INT to scale with ARC instead of INT. Incredible useful with the arcane build because you don’t lose out on dealing good damage with some of the workhorse sorceries. Rock throw or whatever it’s called is my bread and butter range attack
Dragon communion seal. Boosts dragon spell damage, but also changes it so your incantations scale with arcane rather than faith. Rotten breath is the main spell of choice here and it’s by far been my most effective damage attack for bosses. Slow cast, but it deals big damage and inflicts scarlet rot.
Rivers of blood in the right hand and then switch between the staff and seal in the left depending on what I’m doing.
Spells are: rock throw, glintstone pebble, rotten breath, dragon fire, cure poison and heal.
For talismans right now I just use the health, stamina and magic plus ones and switch out a 4th depending on what’s going on (like the one that reduces flame damage it in fighting a fire enemy)
I use the helm that gives +3 DEX (can’t remember the name but you get it from the same guy you get rivers off blood from). The rest of my armor I just change out to what I think looks coolest while maintaining a medium equipment burden.
Summons are Banished Knight Oleg +10 and the shield skellies +10. Mainly Oleg has been my guy, but I just got the skellies to +10 and they were real helpful in the last boss fight.
Playstyle is just switch between the Rivers of blood weapon skill, rock throw spell and rotten breath. My guy is pretty effective at killing shit. Rotten breath is just devastating to bosses as long as you can get them distracted by the summons a few times to cast it
Gonna spend the next levels I have trying to get vigor and mind to 40 each because that is there the soft cap hits, and then go back to pumping dex