So I'm roughly 20 hours into the game and I think I should change my strategy up a little bit. I accidentally attacked the undead merchant (darn you, curved R2 button!), but now i'm using his uchigatana. I'm just at the point where I'm starting to collect embers and I wanted some advice on how I should upgrade my uchi. I was planning on running a dexterity build, but realized that I wouldn't really be able to do that and effectively use elemental weapons.

@MikeHawk: As far as I know, once you take a weapon down the thunder path, the stat scaling is removed from the weapon. So, all you need is the minimum dex to use the sword (14, I think). Any further dex increase won't affect the damage of the weapon that much.

Get a curved sword and ascend it to +10 then use Quelaag's soul to turn it into the Fury Sword, which scales with Dex. It's a fire sword with elemental damage. You'll need about 50k souls overall to go from a regular Falchion/Scimitar to the Fury Sword, if you buy all the materials yourself.

sorry, I accidentally posted the thread halfway through (I was typing from my phone). I was about to say that this makes me want to try and do a faith/dexterity build where I would know a few miracles, but focus on divine and occult weapons. Would it be stupid for me to go for this build and upgrade my uchi to a divine and eventually an occult uchi?

Upgrade your uchi to +10 and when you get the right boss soul, change it to Chaos blade. It scales with dex! :D

If you do that, your dex will be useless as your stats for those weapons once turned divine will be either a D or an E while faith will be a C or a B and you would have wasted points in dex. It would work if you haven't leveled much otherwise you should stick to the dex build.

It's a wiki, so take for what it's worth

http://darksouls.wikidot.com/uchigatana.

..but, a Uchi + 10 divine will do 152/185/0/0 and if you take it to +5 Occult, it will do 160/171/0/0. It basically evens out. Going Occult or Divine I guess depends on your preference, and the enemies you plan on going up against. Going occult lowers the base damage, but increases the faith scaling. I have a faith build myself, so this is something I am doing as well.

I also, plan on making some divine weapons as well.

@McShank said:

Upgrade your uchi to +10 and when you get the right boss soul, change it to Chaos blade. It scales with dex! :D

If you do that, your dex will be useless as your stats for those weapons once turned divine will be either a D or an E while faith will be a C or a B and you would have wasted points in dex. It would work if you haven't leveled much otherwise you should stick to the dex build.

I just looked up the chaos blade on the Dark Souls wiki and it says that it damages the user with each use... doesn't sound like too good of an idea. Maybe it would be a good idea to work on upgrading my scimitar and uchigatana and use them for different roles. I can make the scimitar into the fury sword and make the uchi electric just so I can have weapons from two different elements (for exploiting weakness). Honestly, my stats aren't very crazy yet and I could modify my build fairly easily (no stat is over 16), but I now think the dexterity build sounds pretty good. My biggest fear is that I will make a character that burns out towards the end of the game. I used a royal in Demon's Souls and used a magical estoc rapier, and he pretty much sucked by the time I got to the 5th world.