Update time:
Okay, so I looked up where the bosses were. I actually unlocked the path to Friede without realizing it, while I had to look up how to reach the Gravetender. The trip down to his location was not fun, since the Millwood Knights apparently compete with the Londo Knights in archery.
He did kick my ass a few times but it mainly came down to trying to kill the bastard before his giant wolf dog truly entered the battle as well as realizing the wolf does not work like the Sif fight and rolling under him will likely have you roll directly into his attack. Oddly enough, the moment the wolf hit second phase he actually became a hell of a lot easier cause he liked to spam the frost breath attack that kept him stationary for once. I learned later that fighting the mini versions of him in the forest and winning apparently drops his health permanently.
After that, I checked out Friede and oh boy is she interesting. I'm not sure how I feel about these sequential cinematic fights with multiple phases and life bars. It was kind of a novelty for the Ludwig fight and my issue with the Nameless King is that the first phase eventually got kind of boring redoing over and over again, so I'm hoping the same thing won't happen with Friede. I do appreciate the fact she has far less health and takes way more damage than NK did, meaning that reaching her final phase might be less tedious. That teleport move is obnoxious though and tends to slow the fight a bit, not to mention it has some obnoxious tracking when you try to dodge the charge move, almost feels like some of Champion Gundyr's shenanigans with his incredible ability to transition from a charge into a right angle turn followed by a halberd attack.
Still, the fight is actually fun and I like her moveset. Nice to actually see Frost as a real element after the main game sort of played with it but didn't really do anything with it. Let's hope that with a bit more practice I can get this fight down in the bag. It's all about minimizing my Estus use in the first phase.