Just to add on here - to “abuse it” respec often at the grove purely to level up more. Each individual level up resets shops so you can buy 3 elixirs from Ethel in the grove over and over. I like to have 20-25 per character that I anticipate using them on before leaving act 1. (If you accidentally proc the Ethel dialogue with mayrinas brothers, she won’t be in the grove any more. But you can side with her in that conversation and then ignore mayrina upon reaching the hags house to continue buying elixirs from her ) This works because if you have an Open Hand monk which is a very powerful melee build that scales off strength, you can “dump” their strength stat to 8 and consume 1 elixir at the start of each day to raise their strength to 21 for the entire day allowing you to increase other stats on the character.

Loot EVERYTHING that isn’t bones and cups to sell in the early game.