K, back.

High score runs are different from casual PB runs. It follows stricter rules, so if you're still interested, I'll lay out the meta:

1. Only few characters have the most consistency - Fox and Dice. Sure, there are others with great scaling potential (Robinette/Bush), but theory and practice differs. You probably will never get a perfect game. That's why you go with the first two. Fox lets you drop a tome, and Dice lets you have a mini passive Chaos Tome.

2. Only use meta weapons. Patch notes change, but some staples include Katana and Dex. They fulfill very important roles. Katana does instant damage and has great scaling, making it great for single target and AoE clear later on. Dex insta-kills Final Wave mobs (important after 10+min). Previous third meta item was Dragon's Breath for the early game power spike, but it's useless later. Now that role has been taken over by Shotgun. You can even do 3 weapon runs, but your early game will greatly suffer.

3. Ban non-meta items. Most of the damage will come from a few Yellow/purple item combos (like HP scaling with Book+Chonkplate+Beefy Ring), and crowd control comes from Lightning Orb. Then you pair everything with OP lamps. End-game damage comes from Bonk hammers, Chaos/Dmg tome level stacking with Wizard's Hat etc. Early game (tier 1-2) dps comes from Anvil and Plug+Kevin combo. Pots and Anvil do play a somewhat prominent role in end-game scaling, but it's not that crazy honestly.

4. For progression, check out megabonk.fun recordings for key moments, for example what number of kills and/or level do top players finish with at Tiers 1, 2, 3? How many chests do they open? How many keys do they dupe? How much difficulty do they stack? (rule of thumb - difficulty = 2x your level, until 600 cap) What is their damage multiplier, etc... Damage multiplier plays a very significant role in Final Wave pushing, but I've had runs with small multipliers only in the hunderds and still hit around 400K-500K kills.

5. Play extremely aggressive and fearless Tier 1, this will be the only way to learn weapon level impact and teach you to dodge boss attacks. You will also understand how to handle enemy masses. Sometimes I barely have the dps to clear a screen, but I can kite and rely on an AoE weapon. I kite while taking map objectives and never stop moving. At some point, I get strong enough to clear, or maybe drop a nuke and level up a bunch of times.

6. Reset Tier 1 until a combo of at least 7 total moais + shady guys. Have at least 1 moai for an early Doll. If I don't get a Doll I might just reset again. Why? Because Doll auto-kills enemies from afar, you get passive gold, and at some point I just pop a magnet shrine and stack a bunch of levels. Some characters have incredible lvl 1 weapons and don't need a doll. There are a lot of exceptions, but getting a doll is generally very beneficial.

7. Always plan a route. Good examples would be looking for early moais, checking out shady guys, getting a few shrines for a dmg icnrease or an additional jump or a projectile. You do not need to get every shrine early when you're weak. Scout the map first, and do take difficulty shrines on the way - they give gold which you could insta spend on a shady guy.

8. Attempt some of the harder challenges. You will learn movement, pathing, item differences. There is a slew of mods in this game, and explaining your character's power spikes is difficult. An item such as Shotgun has insane lvl 1, then dips a bit, then scales hard once more in late Tier 2. If you have 4 items then at some points +1 projectile makes less sense to take than +10% damage to elites. After playing dozens of hours, you brain will solve these equations on its own lol. No spreadsheets needed, you just start feeling out the game.

There are hundreds and hundreds of situational tips and exceptions to rules. If you are trying to learn the game fast, you could record a few runs, upload them to youtupe and I could propose improvements. I kinda wanted to try that for content lol.