Unless you want to follow guides for your entire life, consider your first few runs a wash, where you will make mistakes with skill and attribute allocation. It will educate you and you will be better for it. The game is completely possible to win with a character that is not perfectly min/max'd but there is s good amount of skill involved with success and a lot of your "power" doesn't come from avatar efficacy, it comes from knowledge.

To answer your specific question without being a pretentious asshole, if you are building ranged weapons, you typically don't need to divide your skill points amongst melee weapon abilities and ranged. You want to focus on ranged abilities and rounding out your support abilities to shore up any weaknesses that the ranged tree doesn't cover. That said, there are abilities that can be utilized by ranged and melee weapons all the same and they are very powerful and useful, especially in the early game.

Instead of grabbing specific weapon abilities, grab attack skills from Warfare like Seize the Initiative and War Cry. Seize works with ranged or melee weapons and can be helpful when an enemy manages to close the gap. If you want to focus on melee but still want a strong ranged sidearm, spend a single point and grab Dexterity from ranged weapons. It gives tremendous value for a single point and ensures that you will take out any fleeing enemies while also guaranteeing a strong start against enemy packs.

Nothing wrong with building into two weapons, but if you are aiming to become a master of both, that's a tall order.

With that said, my suggestion if you wish to stick to this VIABLE build, is to decide if you like being ranged or melee more.

If prefer ranged, you should focus more on the Ranged weapon tree and perhaps 3-4 skill points on your melee tree. This is just a suggestion, by all means, do what you want and experiment.

If prefer melee, you technically ONLY need Take Aim from the Ranged Weapon tree, as its the most important skill in the entire tree. So you can easily put 1 point (or 2, putting one more into the Dexterity passive) and then invest into your melee weapon of choice.

Extra bit: for hybrid ranged fighter builds, I usually take my Ranged Weapon skills up to Upper Hand (the right side of the skill tree) and Take Aim. This lets you apply Hunters Mark and fight like a Ranger Knight.

At the very first few levels, I suggest putting 1 point into Take Aim first and only adding more once you are sure its what you want. You only need Take Aim to reliably use a ranged weapon.

you SHOULD build dual wield you SHOULD take drugs before every dungeon you SHOULD rawdog it

Having ranged and a melee is fine. As a new player it makes sense, but fully investing in both skill trees might leave you wanting. Look in other skill trees to compliment your build. Warfare etc.

You can, but your build will be very late game oriented. Usually you prioritise one, getting good support skills for that weapon, before rounding out your build with a weapon that complements the first weapon. 

This is a painfully stupid question

The doot horn, obviously.

The friends you made along the way.

Club

Obviously it's the pizza slicer and the jazz bubble club.

The real answer is that there's no best weapon, everything can become death incarnate in the right hands.

If you're fine with making use of weapon buff spells or items, I recommend the Executioner Greatsword. It's not infusible (but can be buffed for some reason), and doesn't have any faith scaling. But what it does have is INSANE STR damage, blunt damage, and gives you a bit of FP on every enemy killed so you have more uptime for your buffs. It's basically the best Paladin type of weapon, and can be buffed to whatever damage type your build is. Otherwise a lot of the other comments have more specific STR/FTH weapons, but I felt like I should throw EGS out there since I feel like it's slept on.

As for getting more upgrade mats, the next area (Farron Keep) has an item you can find in a tower that, when given to the shrine handmaid, lets you buy infinite titanite shards. There's a few of these around the game that let you buy infinite of each upgrade mat (except for slabs, keep those for your favorite weapons!)

You can also infuse a simple gem to your shield, which gives you a bit of FP/s regen to have more spells to throw out.

I definitely recommend the Lothric Knight Greatsword and the Dragon's Tooth.

I recommend something but for pyro

40/40 fai int build + longsword with chaos gem + great swamp ring, witch ring, sage ring, fire clutch ring

A ligthning/blessed infused lothric knight greatsword it's probably the best choice or the dragonslayer greataxe for some nasty damage, If you instead want something a bit lighter and less stat demanding a lightning claymore is a great choice aswell

I recommend dragon slayer axe and lothric knight greatsword ( I'm also doing faith build ) currently using the axe, I wouldn't bother using the spear until you can put lightning on it ( but if you wanna do what I did and just use the Trident for skeletons put blessing infusion on for the time being and that way you'll have a decent weapon to stop skeletons from respawning ) also the scaling on the Trident goes to A in faith with either blessed or lightning.

I’d have to say SnS. It’s really good all round and can fill in any gaps you feel a team has.

Can KO almost as well as a Hammer (personally I’d say better but we gotta give hammer mains something).

Does pretty decent damage, I’m not talking GS damage per single hit but I find it similar to Longsword with less range.

Can block an ‘oh shit’ moment and prevent carting.

Can use items while unsheathed.

For your team, you’ve got the bonk, the boom and the range covered, so a damage based SnS would be good. If the hammer main changes up, switch to playing for KOs etc.

But really, the ‘best’ weapon is whatever you’re best with. I find I’m best with Gunlance and we’ve all seen how unimpressive it is compared to some weapons.

Best support is finishing the fight faster, so unless you’re actually good at hunting horn or sns (not standing around buffing but actually doing damage), it’s not worth doing some support build. Just let everyone deal with their own health and do more damage. This isn’t a game that has things like supports or tanks.

Hunting horn, everybody loves HH bros.

HH coz it's support other players. But then again, I'm the one who need support hahahaha

Maybe try the Hunting Horn to buff your teammates

Blasphemous Blade paired with the Sacred Relic Sword. One jump attack decimates most things

Oh were doing it like that

1. Ruin gratesword
2. Bloodhound fang
3. Radahns blades

Darkmoon greatsword

The giant crusher is probably my favorite, I really like the item description.

Im a filthy casual so:

1. Moonveil

2. Rivers of Blood

3. Sword of Night and Flame

Ps. I dont play pvp, please dont hate me

My go to for solo farming is Greatsword with blood drinker. I can solo just about anything especially if I use the right side tree on Greatsword that has a frontal shield when charging heavies. Any secondary weapon you want is fine, hammer has good rends (trenchent rend, sundering shockwave, sundering clear out, and armor breaker) which speeds things up quite a bit. I was able to solo Montrapala the Unruled and his spawns for an artifact quest, but it took like 20+ minutes to kill him.

To survive Sword/flail + shield

To survive 40% worse but damage 200% better blunderbuss+ig

considering blunderbuss+ig wont put you into position where you can get with shield build

Bloodrinker?

Lifestaff/VG

For PvP or PvE?

For PvE, greatsword + great hammer blooddrinker tank or power stone flail + light staff paladin healer.

Greatsword straight up has a higher skill ceiling in multiplayer. You can't punish head turns since you never know which way the monster will turn so you have to take advantage of the smaller openings. On top of that you have to deal with desync if you're not the host. If I play GS online, my game plan is to stagger the monster as quickly as possible at the beginning of the hunt to measure the desync, and then time my attacks in advance so that they actually hit on the hosts screen.

I find that gunning is more fun in multiplayer. Takes the pressure off you a bit.

LBG is the biggest difference imo because multi opens up tons of playstyles for it that are not viable solo

Hammer is nicer online ;). Also GS when everyone knows what they're doing can be super pleasant

HBG is thee most dumb fun weapon out there. Whenever you wanna shut your brain off and just do DMG, it's fun to just spray on them.

Aerial hammer is fantastic in multiplayer, a little harder to pull off solo but still fun. Pretty much any weapon/style with counters/guard points is not gonna be as fun in multiplayer. Can't counter if it doesn't aim at you.

Valor ls is, I think, probably the best solo weapon. Adept hh comes in pretty close for me, but pretty much every weapon with adept style is more fun in solo. People also shit on valor hammer as being bad, (probably is) but it's so fun against the right monster.

So of every type? here we go, long one:

Thrusting Shields: Dueling Shield. There are only two of these, so really they're basically the same, but the Carian one is better stat wise by a touch against anything not heavily magic resistant.

Hand-to-hand: Dane's Footwork. The two are again pretty close, but Footwork is higher commitment. Not a huge difference though.

Throwing weapons: I'm going to include all of them and not just the daggers here, and I'd say the Axe. It's high commitment but not all that strong.

Backhand Blades: probably the Smithscript Cirque (is that cheating to put the throwing weapons in judgement twice? eh). The ranged attack is nice but that's not really why you want to use the weapon class, the other two are better for shredding.

Perfume Bottle: Probably the poison one. It does physical damage which kinda negates the idea of pure elemental damage that's the main draw to the class, there are better ways to poison and take advantage of poison.

Beast Claws: Again only two weapons so... I'd say the base Beast Claw is probably the worse of the two. Lower damage output and none of the ashes really make up for not getting the unique skill of Red Bear's Claw

Light Greatswords: Leda's. The skill misses a lot, the others are more flexible. Still good though.

Great Katanas: Dragon Hunter's. The basic one can benefit from Occult infusion and Rakshasa's is more generally usable, Dragon Hunter's is nice against dragons of course, but the skill is less consistent.

Daggers: Ivory Sickle. Locked to quickstep, god awful damage. At least Celebrant's can be an ash of war mule.

Straight Swords: Cane Sword probably. Just an inferior amount of damage with no uniquely good properties. Usable, just always sub-par

It’s mostly the move set. It’s true that you could feasibly beat the game with them but I seriously think it would be easier to beat the game with just a torch because of how much easier the melee moveset is to master and the tedium of grinding runes or materials with bolts that you’ll have to replace with more grinding for more bolts along with having no stat scaling, stuck with the kick AOW, uninfuseable, and comparatively low DPS. Again it’s entirely doable but arguably the hardest and definitely the most tedious

Probably Cane Sword. It's worse than the weathered SS or the stone sheathed sword. Ivory sickle is ass, but quickstep is still quickstep. Smithscript daggers take forever to kill but you can still use them at a safe distance. Cane sword? Hopeless. Bad damage, bad range, no critical modifier, bad scalings, the only redeemable thing is square off. And it's the worst square off in the game

People posting weapons that have very functional movesets / weapon classes regardless of their damage. Try beating the game with just Crepus's Black-Key Crossbow.

What makes a weapon good or bad? Everyone says the dancers blades are the worst, for example, but they have sometimes worked better than everything else

It is also one of the only weapons with a secret upgrade! If you get both twin princes swords, you can fuse them and aging both powers. It does split damage a bit more than I like but still really cool.

The second best boss weapon that is only behind dragon slayer great axe. Geunine good weapon and does alot of damage

You have to beat the boss twice. One in NG, a second time in NG+. Make sure to grab one weapon in NG and the other in NG+ and then you can combine them into a unique greatsword