I feel the obvious strategy is to try and find a ring of elements and get it pretty high leveled.

A few notes. First, a shuriken is a thrown weapon (sometimes called missile weapons), not a melee weapon.

Secondly, I have two runs on record where I used only only tier 1 gear, with additional stipulations. The first was a warden run where I finished with strength 6, having used no strength potions and equipped two cursed might rings, on in the caves and one in the halls. For that run, I ended with +10 armor to avoid encumbrance, but both my +3 gloves and my +5 bow were too heavy, though I used then anyways.

The second run was a completely potionless/scrolless rogue run. I ended with the same gear I started with, and didn't end up with any additional rings or artifacts either because I couldn't confirm any were uncursed. Now, I have done potionless/scrolless with three classes total, but in the other cases I either had a lucky armor drop (leather +3 for Warden), or I found a great shield (for mage; I couldn't attack with it, but melee combat wasn't a good idea anyways so that wasn't really an issue), so that rogue run was the only one of those that was all T1.

I do think that highlighting the current floor would be a nice UI tweak though.

Just wondering, are there a few variations for each region? Randomly picking from say, 3 or so different loading screens seems like it would be in line with some of the other variety features, such as the three-part music tracks or the three sad ghost dialogue lines per region.

The most important talent on sniper is shared upgrades. You don't need a great variety of thrown weapons to kill just a few enemies, and each thrown weapon upgrade increases the bow's special attack by 30%. The tomahawk + followup strike can kill basically anything just fine, if you upgrade the tomahawk.

Just wondering when you plan on releasing this update in alpha? Its close to the date you had anticipated after the last update.

Just curious if you're willing to share any info on those 9 badges. Any chance they're related to the subclasses? It's sort of weird that Gladiator players get one more badge than anyone else.

One of them is lore entries, because that tab had been removed from the bottom? A bestiary would wish be nice.

Currently the tiers have 5/7/6/7/7 weapons, although the 7th tier 2 weapon is the pickaxe which isn't pictured here.

I still never understood why magical porter was removed. Yes, alchemize replaced the merchant beacon, but magical porter served a different role. At the very least alchemize should allow the old porter effect as an option, which would be another way to help with inventory management.