You can pretty easily go in any order from the start. Everyone says "You MUST go through FOFG/Heide's Tower/Lost Bastille first" but the whole early game is pretty well balanced.

• The gutter and black gulch pretty much dont depend on your stats at all. The most common enemies in the gutter are literally hollows and black gulch is more about the environmental challenge. If you can actually get down here in the first place you are good to go.

• I dont know about you but I've never found any of the enemies along the Najka route very dangerous. Maybe the invisible guys in shaded woods because of targeting issues, but every other new enemy is just too slow to be actually dangerous. And again hollows make up a good portion of the enemies in tseldora.

• Most of enemies along the iron keep route are not too hard either if you don't try and tackle optional areas like the poison pit or sickle dude gangbang in Harvest valley, or the route to the blood arena in Huntsmans Copse. Iron keep itself is probably the only real stumbling block with the bridge room full of alonne knights.