Generally the order i go with is 1-Skills 2-Equipment store 3-Health 4-Gold 5-Magic 6-Item store 7-Rune exchanger-NEVER. And runes are soo scarce that 3 for 1 is a bad deal, even if it feels like you have a ton of bronze ones at the time. Never pick the rune exchanger, it is too expensive and you can not even pick what rune you making. By the time you hit floor 4-6 you most likely picked up a secondary weapon ( thanks to your dexterity at 4) to help your damage output when there are too many support monsters(healers/armor and attack buffers) to make opening every tile a viable strategy any longer.Дў-Floor Clearing Bonuses: Killing all monsters on a floor gives you a choice of one bonus out of 7 random possibilities: Gold / Health / Magic / Skills / Item store / Weapon store / Rune exchanger. Save the ballista if aimed properly for the final shot to kill the damage dealer when you are out of magic or they are the last enemy. Explore as many tiles as possible to find the knight/ghost, and use your class skill that lowers damage to you and target them till the enemies die. The first 3 Floors ALWAYS have at least one ghost or knight( they deal double incoming damage to other mosters)and no enemy healers. They are less than $10 gold anyways and you can always right-click and 'forget' them if you find better later on.ДЎ-Using Monsters Against Monsters: You may be thinking 'Why do you boycott Strength for so long?' Mainly for the above reasons, but i will elaborate further. Always get any skill offered that you qualify for. And probably the best of the bunch is the skill that doubles your damage for one attack. Especially good is the one that increase Attack by 4 and resets if you kill within 4 turns. My goal is to always have a second skill by floor 4-6 as even the simplistic non-Intelligence based skills become a game-winning added option you will need to survive further down.

Yes you have to be lucky to get the right skills early, but increasing your dexterity early makes it less likely that you miss skills.

rattlesnake/stun/double crit damage/extra to hit chance to name a few.ДЈ-Skills: There are a couple of Skills that require 4 dex-namely the one that takes down enemy armor. Not to mention the useful passives a second weapon provides. You need to be able to weild that second weapon as soon as possible to keep up with the monster's increasing hitpoints. Also if you take to many hits at start, all those heart drops just go to replenishing hitpoints, instead of increasing your max.Дў-Melee Weapons: SInce the most likely weapons to find early all require 4 dex ( dagger/club/brass knuckles ), your damage output starts falling behind quickly by floor 3-4. This severly diminishes your damage output for rest of floor if you have counter attack. It is important not to lose your shield against the first monsters. Ultimately most the time, even though it does less damage than your melee weapons, it kills your opponent in fewer total turns, thus you lose less/no hitpoints and mana. Sometimes your path to that ranged attacker is blocked by a pitfall/monster or interactive device. Especially if you were lucky enough to find/buy armor with counter attack. With 4 dex you can use shortbow and lightcrossbow(modest 8 base damage) for the rest of the game.ДЎ-Ranged Attackers: This helps kill those pesky mana sucking wizards and archers that spawn at the start of the floor quicker than the time it would take to walk into melee range. Shortly after this increase(floor 3, 4 or 5) you will start to run into ranged enemies and enemies with armor. The dexterity increase at level 3 is threefold in rational, which i will entail below. A final strength of 10 is important to use decent weapons/armor later.

Stamina you want to increase early to build up your survivability while the enemies can still reasonably be killed by your default strength. Outlined below is when/what to increase and why. The reason for this exact ratio is to use pacticular equipment to min-max what is being thrown at you in the timing of descending the dungeon. When you level up an attribute is equally as important which one. Level 10 Attributes-Str:10 / Dex:4 /Int:2 /Sta:7 Guy's Starting Attributes- Str:5 / Dex:3 / Int:2 / Sta:4ДЄfter tinkering with level-up stat allocation, I have found the following set up to be the most useful to making it further and for min-maxxing Guy's equipment Loadout. The passive abilities you buy in the store do make the game easier, but are not totally neccesary for some reasonably deep early runs. The start can seem very tough until you understand better the game mechanics. Since you have to progress to unlock other characters, the hardest part of game is managing to make it further each go with Guy.

Runestone keeper fish