If you're on pc there's a lovely little mod that adds every item to the first merchant in the game, it's a game changer for experimenting. I found some cool bow talismans late in the DLC and wanted to start a new character to play through the whole game again but the prospect of having to go through 90% of it just to get an integral part of the build got me to finally "cheat" and I am I never going back. I've been able to just play the game and have fun doing the parts I actually want to instead of hunting down every bell bearing again and consulting the wiki constantly to ensure I don't accidentally break some obtuse npc quest chain that gives me an item I need. I also used it on my level 200 character so that I could play around with different weapons without grinding out a million+ souls to buy the stones and level them, having an infinite number of respec items is also great. The game clearly doesn't respect the player's time so why respect it at this point? I've already had "real souls vets" tell me that uncapping the framerate and playing in ultrawide is cheating so fuck it