I've been playing it and passed the first boss but he was quite a challenge, I had to play around with weapons and stuff. I can't remember what I did but I upgraded a bunch of stuff like spirit ashes (either the Jellyfish or Lhutel the Headless I don't remember which one I used) and upgraded damage on my sword. I upgraded a bunch and then went back, got a few incantations. Was able to finally beat him.
However, a good farming early game for ruins is this video here, each enemy is 1,000 runes each, basically at Farum Greatbridge Site of Grace in Caelid is a great place, here is the video. It's well worth it because the enemies are easy enough to get.
[media=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8W3wJaI_Twc]
Also.. you can respect your character in Liurnia but from what I've come to find out, my character is strongish regarding some things but extremely weak against stronger foes. I found out that you could be leveling your character wrong too. For instance most people think that they only need 20 vigor or so but for the beginning you should have at least 50.
And that apparently when you level, you soft cap which means that they stop giving you as much "vigor" with each level (I'm bad at explaining things.) But basically when you hit level 50, you don't get that much vigor anymore with each rune leveling.
So you may want to look into more.
Here's the video I found on why you may need to up vigor:
[media=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuapvoPr4Xg&t=76s]