So, I've seen the question pop up tons on various forums, had people directly ask, or seen it in various chats.

"What is a good way to build STR/FTH?"

Finally I'm here to answer the question in a way that makes the build as useful as possible through the early game and on. For PvP/PvE, co-op, arena, you name it. If you want a way to stay strong early, and continue to do well without needing to be soul level 200+ look no further.

Why the Cleric? Because he starts with everything we need to burn through the early parts of the game, even for a novice player, this guy is a power house that can take hit after hit. Lets take a look at his equips and what gift we're going to choose.

The mace: Simply the most devestating starter weapon in the entire game. This thing just on it's own power can carry you through NG and NG+ on its own merits alone. It can be somewhat clumsy to use at first, but once you get the hang of it, and the move set down, you have a great counter to all heavy armored foes in PvE. It's your goto weapon for any small skirmish, but I'd weigh its use carefully when engaging more then one enemy at a time. Its durability will ensure it lasts through long treks of exploring and co op. Upgrade this to +6 first ASAP.

The archdrake robe: While you don't get the whole set, just this single piece is beast. While it's a bit on the heavy side, it provides high defense, a little poise, and is just right at the start of the game to mix match around with other things you find while staying light on your feet. I wouldn't suggest upgrading it, unless you really like the look, and are going to farm the other archdrake pieces later. But, if you feel you're going to be in it for awhile, do so if you like.

Cleric's Sacred Chime: This is your starter chime, used to cast miracles. You'll be using this through most of your first playthrough in NG. There's no real need to upgrade this unless you are desperate to branch out into offensive miracles early. Heals and the miracle self buffs do not scale up with a higher FTH investment, or from upgrading your chime. It has the second fastest cast time for a chime, tied with the protective chime. There are two chimes with faster cast times then this one. Dragon chime and caitha's chime. Both of which are end game chimes, and can be somewhat difficult to obtain early on, and they have steep stat requirements to equip. Considering they are not much faster, and they require a large soul level investment on your part, it is better to simply ignore their possible use until your build branches out into other directions.

Heal: One of the best abilities for a novice player, or even an experienced one. This lets you save healing crystals and lower the amount of farming/spending souls on them for healing. It's a great stop gap for not dumping valuable souls on a disposable way to heal. In co op it helps you keep your friends alive, and is best used after a rough fight or before one if hurt. It's also great for invades/being invaded, as it provides a solid way to restore some life. Don't try using it in combat, that's what you have estus for. The cast time is just a bit to long to try pulling out in combat.

Starting Gift: I highly suggest going with healing wares. It gives you extra healing crystals at the start, and even a way to deal with poison when you run into it, which you will. The other gifts come off as very meh. I see this as the best starter option overall unless you're planning on getting lucky with the petrified something.

Ok the first thing I need to get out of your head, is offensive miracles. Sorry, it's not going to happen. Lightning Bolt has 3 uses and doesn't even hit as hard as heavy soul arrow early on. Wrath of the Gods is a no go for most players until NG+3. So don't count on it. Emit Force is a joke, long cast time, very poor damage, a chance to MAYBE knock down.

Some of the AoEs are effective, but they come much later in the game, and require a pretty steep invest in FTH. They usually get beat out by the various pyromancy storms anyways, which require a much smaller investment. We're not going to be dumping tons and tons into FTH. We're only going to be putting just enough in it to make it feasible to use early on. After that it's up to your discretion on what direction to take it in. Though most will focus on self buffs.

We're not going to be infusing. Our FTH simply isn't going to be high enough early on to be of any benefit. All it will do is hamper our damage by a fairly nominal amout. When you first look at infuse it seems an excellent idea, but it is not. You have to go through two seperate defenses per swing, and unless you know every enemies resists off the top of your head it's not going to work out as well for you. We're keeping straight damage on our weapons, and aiming for low stats to just wield them. Even with just the raw stats needed to wield the weapons we are aiming for, the attack bonus will outshine an infusion and or raw infusion. Keep this in mind, and forget about elemental infusion until SL 150+.

This one is simple, we're using it for heals and self buffs. That's it. Like I said the various heals are a great stop gap for not having to burn crystals like candy. Some of the self buffs can be used to great effect, including the ones that regen your health over a set period. All of this is very useful, and only requires a very paltry investment for it to be ffective on a cleric. The magic number is 18 for Med Heal and quite a few other utility FTH spells (Including a way to wipe poison off you and any nearby allies). That's 4 whole levels in FTH as a cleric to open those up, and they let you go through any area in the game with only 3 attunement slots without any worry of ever dying, unless of course you rush ahead, or you just were not prepared for a boss fight. This also lets you co op with randoms or a friend and helps keep them alive even when things turn sour, or your co op buddy runs out of ways to heal.

The first things were going to need to do are simple. Get a single point in STR to one hand your mace ASAP. This will allow you to equip a shield at least. Most the time though you want to be two-handing your weapon for max damage. There will be very few instances where you'll want to one hand it. Usually for the move set, or if you just feel you need your shield up at the time. Get comfortable with rolling through attacks with low weight and low ADP. We won't be able to touch ADP for awhile, until we have throw away levels to put in.

Everything else is all you as far as discovery and ring selection goes. Try to aim for the lightest equip load you can while still having some defense. Faster stamina regen and dodge win the day over blocking. Don't attempt parrying unless you are comfortable with it, otherwise you're going to give the enemies alot of free hits. The mace is fast, but not as quick as a sword. You'll want to stick and move and choose your hits, and you'll have to know when to commit for a kill with the weapon, as the more hits you chain, the more vulnerable you're left to a follow up.

When you do get masses of souls built up, dump them into END for stamina. We start out with the worst END in the game, meaning the lowest stamina. We want to get it to 20 ASAP so we can pick and choose our hits, and always have some left over to roll or block with.

After you prioritize END bring your FTH to 18 and ATN to 16. This gives you enough slots to play around with, and just enough FTH to MED heal and some of the other utility miracles. It's to make your life easier, especially since coming by the estus flask shards is harder then ever in this version. These spells will let you solo explore an area with little worry of death, and allow you to co op with friends for extended durations in their world without running dry on healing.

Your next step is to spend 16k souls at Maughlins shop. Once you do that drop yourself to 0 souls. Go talk to him for the invisible Aurous set (You must be at 0 souls when talking to him, and you must have spent 16k souls and progressed his story). This armor set is going to be what you're wearing for a long long time from here on out. It's light weight, very decent defense, and increases your overall load capacity. Meaning you can actually have some defense now, and we'll still have good stamina regen. Early on you always want to keep a light set. Poise barely matters against most enemies, and stamina regen trumps most things. You never want to be standing around staring at you stamina bar waiting on it so you can make an attack, or have it come to an acceptable level in anticipation of a dodge. You need that stuff to come back almost in a blur, to the point where you don't even need to care about the bar.

Next we head to No-Mans Wharf for the Bandit Axe. You'll need 18 STR for this bad boy. And you want to take it to +6 when you can. It's your slashing alternative to your mace. It's great for taking out multiple enemies due to its range and wide sweeping arc. Its raw damage starts out stronger then the claymore, and ends up about the same when maxed. It has almost the same reach of the claymore, and imo is faster and has a better over all move set. It also has higher counter damage. It only has one tiny draw back, it's slightly fragile at a durability of 50, and ramming it into wall with its wide sweep tends to eat through the weapon quick. Try to reserve its use for open areas, or when you know you really want to use it. You'll get addicted to the power of a lighter great sword with a much better and faster moveset, along with the brutally low reqs for the wep. This paired with the mace for heavy armored enemies and a heavy crossbow for dealing with things at range are your easy tickets through NG.

Put 1 point into DEX. Yes, I know. 1 point into a stat we'll never care about again until we think about picking up the aveyln. It's so you can equip the heavy crossbow you get from Earthen Peak. Infuse it with raw and upgrade it, and it's your answer to any ranged threat your going to run into. It's also great against people that try to flee from you, or just plunking away decent chunks of life from enemies at a safe distance. Once it's upgraded it's great for taking out dogs and other vermin without ever letting them become a threat in the first the place. Until then use the light crossbow you find to take out enemies through early areas. Mainly the ones hanging from ledges, or the annyoning ones you have to travel halfway across the planet to get around to them. It'll suffice until you get to the heavy crossbow. Don't bother upgrading the light one, as it's only one pound less, and does quite a large chunk less of damage.

That's up to you. You can continue just using the base equipment and stats from this guide to easily blow through NG. You could continue to expaned your miracles and FTH and possibly go for an infuse build. You can keep trucking down the path of the warrior, pump DEX some and open some other weapons options. The ones I listed however are very "safe" weapons, and it'll be hard to match their damage and relative usefulness. If you want to burn some DEX I'd highly suggest the Avelyn and the Grand Lance. Both are really excellent, and can be great answers to a variety of enemies.

I definitly suggest getting a different armor set when you can get your hands on one you want to upgrade. I don't suggest going past about 45% load. As I feel anything above that slows your stamina to a crawl. Look for some of the various light sets that have the resists that interest you. Or look for a lighter armored set like Alvas if you dump some serious points into VIT along with the load capacity rings. If you can stomach it, I'd highly suggest farming for dragon scales off various enemies, or doing some PvP. The armor you get from trading in 20 scales is highly worth it. It weighs almost nothing, has amazing resists, doesn't need repaired, and has some of the best defense per weight in the game.

You totally can if you want. You'll be throwing quite a few heal crystals away though, or finding yourself with no way to heal in co op/while exploring often enough. That and even with a fully upgraded glove you'll find very few pyromancies are useful due to not pumping INT/FTH for the damage. Literally you'll be using Flame Swath, and a tempest spell throughout most of your encounters until you get forbidden sun at the very end of the game. Not very felixible, and really only useful against large targets or unsuspecting ones.

This was a mainly a guide for people that wanted that alternative. The people that want to play a paladin or cleric. It's also a great guide for newer players. Giving them straight direction on how to survive and what weapons to aim for quickly. I've seen so many people simply scream "RUSH BLACK KNIGHT HALBERD!!!" For most players it becomes a half useless weapon. You need great spacing, the one handed attacks on it hit walls and bounce off, and there's more fire resist enemies in the game than any other type. It's a weapon that only someone very comfortable with halberds is going to be able to use to any real effect. That and it takes a very rare material to upgrade, twinkling titanite. It's not really obtained in a large enough abundance to just throw away early on, on a weapon most people are going to find does far less then they thought it did.

If there are enough requests sure. I can make a more detailed guide for everyone. But, as of now, I thought I would just throw this out there for the people that wanted it/asked for it.