In spite of not caring about spoilers/checking for side quests, I still managed to break rogier's quest by joining ranni's service too early. Everything else is going fairly well though. I spent some time in caelid doing bits and pieces, then went down to redmane castle to fight radahn.
For the first time I pulled in an actual human assist along with the npc helpers, we got him down to half health and then I died. Called in the same human again, and got hit by two gravity arrows immediately. I was so embarrassed. I decided I needed to get better at that part before I asked for more human assistance. Cue a lot of very short attempts where I died in about 30 seconds as I got the timing down. At that point I realised that I was much better off keeping my focus on summoning the npc allies back than tackling radahn directly, so that's what I did. And... It totally worked lol. I think I fired two rock slings the whole battle, blaidd and alexander did the rest. It was very funny afterwards to have them talk about what a great champion I was. It was a little disappointing that I feel like I didn't have to upskill at all to get radahn, but I know there are other bosses waiting to give me plenty of grief.
Other thoughts: Caelid is so beautifully sad. Like, this whole area of the map that's just eaten away and ruined. The art direction and environmental storytelling is top tier. I really admire how deft the level curve is on each area. You get there and everything is big and terrifying and doing chunks of your health, and you just run away as much as possible while you scout out caves and such that you can reasonably take on. And then you get your levels and bit by bit you become more confident, your running away skills get stronger and better as you learn to navigate the area, and by the end you know you can comfortably handle anything that wants to chomp on you.
Dragons are still a pain in the butt. I did kill the one in limgrave, and the very big one who can't fight back, but I should probably go and test myself against the one in liurnia soon. Are they easier with non-ranged builds? No idea.
I'm still pure int with minor sword backup, but I'm toying with the idea of heading for a faith/int endgame. Would be fun to be able to use the cool death magic, and dragon spells obviously rule too. Idk, when i have enough larval tears we'll see what feels fun. And don't think I'm above doing the rivers of blood respec just for herself. Role-playing be damned, I will get the win on malenia no matter what it takes.
Oh and finally: the radahn cutscenes ruled. So good.