At the end of the game’s first act, having sided against Galahad and cleared all the available quests, I ended up at level 30 with my highest substats at 79 (One Handed), 72 (Sneak), 46 (Athletics), 44 (Handcrafting & Theft), 40 (Light Armor), and 33 (Block).
While I went for a melee-stealth build… that seems to have been a mistake. There aren’t really many opportunities to backstab enemies and it’s more efficient most of the time to just rush in with a charge attack, dodge back, then repeat. Stealth seems far more useful for ranged characters and fortunately there are a decent number of respec potions so I can get back the couple of wasted backstab skill points if this remains true in the next act. Both parrying and critical damage are great though and I don’t regret putting points into those two trees at all.
Attribute-wise I’m currently at 10 Per, 8 Dex, 7 Str/End, and 4 Prac. The odd spread is to wear Bald Cait’s Tunic, with the Keeper’s Boots, Parrying Gauntlets (to be replaced with Duel Knight Gloves next Endurance point), and Duel Knight Cape. For head and legs I’m planning on eventually using Lancelot’s armor (wearing Hatchling’s Mask and Traveler’s Pants at the moment), which means I have to get up to 15 Str/End. For weapons I’m using Spine Splinter +10 (its ability scales off melee critical chance) and Parrying Dagger, though the latter I plan to replace with the Smuggler’s Knife next act.
The Spine Splinter in particular is worth mentioning because it can only be acquired through the randomized identification system. Basically, anything you kill at night has a chance of dropping one of six unidentified items. You then spend webs at an upgraded bonfire to ‘roll’ on each item which rewards you with one to three random items. While most of the possibilities aren’t very exciting, there’s allegedly a chance of getting permanent stat-boosting items (I’ve never gotten one) and it’s the only place certain weapons will appear.
Moving on to the magic system, the Wolf’s Call spell is amazingly useful for a melee character even with no points spent in Spirituality or the Summoning skill tree. While many bosses can take them out in one or two hits, the wolves still give you plenty of time to take off a chunk of their health unopposed. Or let you retreat and heal/re-buff. I haven’t bothered trying any offensive spells so can’t speak as to their effectiveness.
As far as completely useless things go, the main two would be housing and the horse. The former serves little point considering the outside stash access, since you can’t display anything (although you can buy furniture if you complete a specific questline), while the latter seems to be slower than sprinting and gets caught up on even slightly uneven terrain. I’d suggest completely avoiding both of these features.