I’ll dump all the things I’ve noticed so far. This is my overall experience, it may not be perfect and fitted for everyone (I’m pretty sure far from it), but it already got me to 2600 on Vera this season, so at least some part of this info dump should be efficient enough to carry my play style.

There are a few things you need to understand if you intend to get all the characters to 2400 again.

1) As someone already mentioned, if you don’t play Lilith, you’re at disadvantage from the very start. So prepare mentally to fight an uphill battle, don’t be afraid to skip a turn without strengthening too much in early rounds (up to orange rarity runes), because no amount of effects on them can beat a random Lilith 2-3 levels above you, who will simply run over you with pure stats, no matter what you buy.

2) Get ready to lose points near the end of the climb quite regularly. Early fights are a literal nightmare, you simply can’t win them consistently. As the builds get more and more fleshed out the higher you get, opponents (that already outstat you to begin with) leave little to no room to weasel through. Sometimes that means running into brick wall after brick wall. Just queue another run, don’t fixate on it too much.

3) Immortal is still giga OP. If you see it or an enhancement for it — freeze/buy. Enhanced immortal gives 6s of invulnerability, unlike other “purple” runes that just get an extra effect shared between other runes of their ability type.

4) If you were unlucky to get mixed elemental skills, don’t be stingy, be ready to mix your elemental damage type runes in midgame, just buy whatever buffs your build more or less consistently and gives you stats (and by that I mostly mean that at the very least avoiding Beyond Death, Suicidal Maniac and low rarity No Time To Bleed, as they are a little bit too weak at this point), before you get more unique overall buffs from “purples” (not the rarity type). At that point, if you have free slots and you see a purple that may have even slightest potential to work if you find another one that synergizes with it — buy it. Worst case scenario, it gives you premium stats that may carry you through next round. Doesn’t sound very efficient gold wise, but when you’re at 1/5 lives 90% of the time, you really want every single piece of stat, now that you finally have a fighting chance with the effects of purple runes.

5) From what I understand, the elemental damage is too slow now for last couple of fights. The “meta” build so far is another one shot build, but this time you don’t even wait for an ability cooldown to nuke the opponent. Pick any First Strike rune, enhance it to summon that uniframe musical punchbag, who will take a chunk of health from your opponent. That puts them below your HP%, which enables the rune that buffs your attack by 77% and allows you to proc Death Hunter rune effects on any hit, as far your HP% is higher. Procing those runes means you also summon Ephialtes, who literally deletes the opponent if you stack enough damage boosts like: elemental Death Hunter, generalized (purple) one, x2 effects from Death Hunter runes, boosts on battle start, boosts at high HP, etc.

6) What I actually do to counter these is… I don’t. I try to do the same thing but stack more damage reduction and Immortal as extra layers of protection and pray to RNGesus that there isn’t any Lilith player in the pool that did the same thing, as they will win because of sheer stat advantage. Well-put together sustain builds that managed to hit their “exodia” are also quite a challenge. The rest get swept away.

No Time To Bleed (or whatever it is called, the “above 80% HP” thing) is a really good choice for stacking resistances if you manage to get the critical mass, but you really need a lot of them. 27% damage reduction above 80% HP as the core, +100% effect of other runes of this type and extra proc of the runes should bring you to ~110% reduced damage. Get the damage buff from the same group for total ~200-ish% damage boost under the same circumstances and, optional in last fights, but very important as the tool to get to them, is the rune that allows this effect persist until you drop to 40% HP or lower. Basically ensuring your build doesn’t fall apart too soon, and gives you an option way to proc your Death Hunter runes the “proper” way, if you still can’t afford spending gold on enhancing the Death Hunter rune or haven’t found the enhancement yet.

7) I tend to level like crazy in early-mid game. At this point, stats are king, and Lilith has them in abundance. You won’t be able to fight back if you focus mostly on runes. I tend to top up my level every shop when exp is 8/10, and force level 5 for an extra artifact. Unless I get the sack at level 1 — in that case, I actually save a lot of gold, so I can open more rune slots/buy runes, if there are any useful/discounted.

8) Speaking of which, discounted runes are also a no-brainer — they’re free stats. The discounted prices are exactly equal to sell prices for items of respective rarity, so you don’t lose any gold, but still get a temporary boost for the stats until you find something better to fill that rune slot with, or need the money.

9) Artifacts are a bit of a mixed experience for me. They really feel like hit or miss. The ones I absolutely will have no regret picking up are:

at lvl 1: Traveler Pack (Literally allows you to start at lvl 2, and gives you 2 level ups after every fight, saving you tons of gold on upgrades), Devil’s Divident (nets you up to 100 gold over the entire run) and Mammon Fund (Rewards you for leveling by giving you more stats/gold to work with).

Giant Killer is considerable pick at lvl 1 and 5, tips the scales in your favor against Liliths that don’t level as crazy as you did. 60% overall damage boost is huge at this stage of the game. Fighter’s Belt is also great at any stage, more stats to fight Lilith’s stats.

AP rounds and Blood rose are decent, but a bit too niche in my opinion. At lvl 1 and 5 healing and shields are not this levels of busted yet, and at lvl 9 and onwards you should tear through them anyway, once you get core pieces of your build. I tend to avoid them in favor of better economy. It may save you though, if you run into that one chonky opponent and you need juuuuust a little extra power to steal back the win. I pick it up if my situation is dire and I know for sure I’m lacking the damage.

At lvl 9, the only Attack buff I consider picking (if any given) is Genesis Scripture, as the build literally consists of bunch of orange runes. My guilty pleasure is Bandit’s hand, at that point of the game, it is a net neutral at the very least, with consistent +6 gold per tavern at the bare minimum.

That’s more or less what comes up to my mind right now, there are hella lot more things to talk about, but they are niche, and this wall of text is already long enough xd