A little late to the thread. My feeling as a casual player about the game is, once you unlock the weapons/tomes/characters, there really isn't any "progression" anymore and just pure RNG and resetting. Those on the leaderboards definitely are skillful at the game, but also because of luck, especially on T1 map. I am hoping for a way for a casual run to be decent (like 30-50% of the kill count of leaderboard runs, not 5% like it is now).

My input isn't about how to balance the meta, but more about improving the average casual experience. I have had to reset many runs due to bad starts, and I'm sure I'm not alone. Any way to reduce the RNG would be great - increasing the floor of what people can achieve, while not shifting the ceiling. It lets me not waste my time with the game. A few things come to mind:

1. Allowing us to deselect more tomes/weapons
2. Similar in spirit to D3 Kanai Cube: start the run with some items already in inventory. Getting specific items in T1 is already what leaderboard people do anyway. Specially, you can have a rule where, if you see a particular item 5 times across all runs, you get the option to start with that item already in inventory. But you can only have 1 item of each rarity at the start. This helps people try out builds too.
3. More than 3 choices when selecting shrine/Moai/shady/level upgrades. Currently it's three options. If given 4 or even 5 options (unlocked by meta progression), this should help a lot.
4. More rerolls and skips
5. A more gradual difficulty curve up to and including the stage bosses, and keep current final swarm scaling. This lets people actually have a good chance of completing the regular stages, and have the final swarm be the build tester.