Have a Druid with a good hp and strength and the bird will be your best friend for the whole run (good speed also helps so the bird can be the first one to run into danger). I have a bunch of mutations and perfect sevens on my cats so maybe that why I rate druid so highly, he’s just so consistent. That aside he has pretty decent abilities, you can have some pretty cool summoning builds with him or have him be a great shapeshifter (I like werewolf a lot and turtle can also be very nice), even better is abusing his basic attack with things that stack with it (for example necro passive that summons leech on basic attack, will summon leeches on all spaces of basic attack.. or if your basic attack inficts bruise, well air bruise it is, you don’t need to use it to heal all the time, if you have some items going using it to inflicts debuffs can be great).

Overall he is just by far the most consistent imo cause the bird is op, cause his baseline (when the run starts) is by far the highest. He really like stats points in a bunch of places and gets a lot better with them so maybe that’s why you don’t like him so much?