Reliably Turning on Red Tearstone Ring

[New Creation]

I'm starting to play around with a glass cannon build for tearing down bosses quickly (Red Tearstone Ring, Unleash Magic, Soul Geyser/Crystal Soul Spear with almost 400 casting speed).

One problem I run into with this approach, however, is reliably getting down to the amount of health required to activate the Red Tearstone Ring. Here are the methods I've tried so far:

1) Chaos Blade - Because your health only decreases when you attack enemies, and I don't have the stats (nor desire) to use this as my main weapon, this doesn't really do the trick. It does work with breakable objects, but you lose so little health with each hit that there aren't enough breakable objects in any area to get to the threshold.

2) Hexes and Abyss Seal - This method takes up attunement slots and you only lose a little bit of health with each attack, making it difficult to get down to the threshold. I didn't explore this one very far before I decided it wasn't the way to go.

3) Immolation - This is the most promising of all of the options, because a single cast from when I'm at full health brings me down to the threshold. However, this takes up two spell slots, which means that between this and Unleash Magic I only have 8 left to get through the level and then kill the boss. It could potentially be made up for the Northern Ritual Band + 2 to increase my cast counts, but then Immolation would kill me instead of bringing me to the threshold. I am going to experiment with using this and putting on the ring to compensate, but it still isn't optimal.

Does anyone else have any ideas of methods that have worked for them?

[.]

get hit by a dual ugs with 10 vit

[Rocket Witch]

Throw Dung Pies, then moss when at the threshold. You can do this in DS1 too, although now that poison drains HP a lot faster it should should be reasonably expedient. The only catch is that the Rat King is the sole seller of Dung Pies, but you can switch covenants freely so it doesn't really matter; just know that you have to go to the trouble of getting to him.

Also, about your experimentation with the Northern Ritual Band: the standard and +1 versions will reduce your max HP by lesser amounts.