Wow!

Second Kettle run and blew my first PB out of the water with a near perfect kettle kill.

The main thing to worry about in this grind has always been money, and we had a few ideas on how to get it: -Fighting regular, weaker enemies so you don't have to go back to town -Spinning in a circle in the dark area so you get more xp/money -Stealing from G'bli -Stealing from Iron nose -Checking doors with chests for gold/items -Using fewer party members to power level thief (for stealing), cleric (for healing), etc. -Doing vampire statue grind for gold/xp/drops to sell

I've tried all of them. G'bli is theoretically the fastest if it works, but in actuality it was around 150 gold/min on average while spinning in a circle in the dark area was closer to 220. The vampire statue grind is faster than any others, but only if you're high enough level to kill the werebat quickly, don't get poisoned, and can cast melito or the like to kill the smaller bats in one go. By the time you can do that, you're almost done anyway.

The one potential thing that could be done to speed this up is a shop glitch that involves (theoretically) buying out iron nose's inventory, stealing with the thief and getting an item (not gold), and then selling that item back to iron nose. If the glitch triggers, the value of the item will be something like :<> or =9= and you'll get a somewhat arbitrary amount of gold. I've received anywhere from 200 to 1800. It's a lot, but you generally need at least 1200 gold to reliably buy out iron nose's inventory, stealing an item is RNG, and sometimes even when you do things right it doesn't seem that the glitch triggers at all because the item needs to have value to be sold in the first place.