I killed Maliki the first try with melee dual wielding great swords. As well as first try on almost all of the FA bosses. The lightning dude on the horse was the only one that gave me problems. Him and chasing elden beast for miles.
On daggers it was pretty easy because unlike some bosses, it's so big you don't constantly miss due to it moving around slightly or whatever, and I had godskin swaddling cloth as one of my accessories, which with daggers heals a ton on this fight since it's based on number of hits and you can often get full L1 powerstance dagger combos out, so you heal like 10-15% of your life everytime it stays still for a bit, which basically heals all the random ass damage from like elden stars or chip dmg from the "rocket beams" thing and such, so you really only have to look out for the big hitters. Ironically it's the one fight I think was better on dagger than it'd have been with other melee weapons, even though it was status immune. Well that and placidusax for the same reasons, really easy to connect with and once it stands still you can get long combos off which lets you leverage the one advantage daggers have over other weapons, their sustained DPS/damage per stamina ratio.
