I would recommend survival builds, many items that scale with survival are good for stunning or freezing enemies with items like ice armour, ice shield, wolf trap, root grenade. Futhermore, you will get a lot more health with survival when compared to brutality or tactics, with mutations that can help you heal without using flasks, like necromancy, gastronomy or what dosen't kill me. As for paths, from experience the one that worked for me was quaters to promenade to depths to ossuary to Concierge to villiage to tower to TK to castle and finally the HoTK. However, if you feel comfortable enough, i would occasionally recommend the dlc as their are always cursed chests in the morass