I equipped the Silvercat Ring for this run simply to avoid damage on some of the jumps, that otherwise I would have to heal through. Also, while I did a terrible job of avoiding melee damage from the enemies, even without being embered, it was easy to heal through. As you might imagine, this entire area is extremely dangerous, so when you do your item collection, you might prefer to do it as a series of suicide runs from either bonfire. There is also an NPC that is hard to talk to without killing some enemies and for that I recommend starting at the Ringed Inner Wall bonfire. Good luck!