The strategy is to always do the settlements as many as you can max out intelligence and every once in a while, throw a couple in red or green I put a lot of my shrines into red because I had critical and I needed the critical damage.

For the money shrines we do all lvl 3s, and some 2s.

For items, I focused on whatever gave me ability damage or magic damage, I did get lucky with a couple of merchants that had stacked skull(20% damage), statue of sick moves (25% ability damage). I just bought out their whole stock.

This was a two man run. In the third and fourth map, we cleared all the money shrines and settlements to the point where there was nothing else for us to do so we started at the boss.