A few important glitches and timesaves for people interested in running this game:
1. Laughing Kettle
The Laughing Kettle can be killed fastest via a "Scroll of Conjuring". This costs 3,500 gold from Boltac's shop. If you get an Air Elemental (preferred), Greater Demon, Djinn, or Golems you can potentially kill the kettle. This gives an obscene amount of experience, taking a character from level 1 to level 14 if they are on their own!
2. Thieves Guild
The Laughing Kettle can be revived for 6,000 gold. Your party needs levels to survive the rest of the game anyway, so if you can get gold quickly you can kill the kettle multiple times if your mage learned Socordi. You can open the door to the thieves guild with your thief or mage after leveling up at the kettle.
3. Ghost Grind
The ghost grind in this is not for XP, but for gold! Stealing from them gets you several high profile items (including the Ring of Frozz, a one-use invoke that gives your mage full spells!) that sell for a lot. You can also buy a special cursed sword called the "Soul Stealer" for 33,750. There is another sword with the same cost you do not want, so it's random chance if you get it.
You can run from the combat to potentially visit another ghost to steal/buy from for speed, but it is good to kill a few to get their items. After identifying them, sell them for the rest of the money you need in the game.
4. Soul Stealer and Demon Statue
At such low levels, it is impossible to reliably deal damage to the big enemy groups you run into. To fix this, we use the Soul Stealer and Demon Statue glitches. By invoking the Soul Stealer (not equipping!) with your fighters, they get large bonus rolls. Having strong weapons is preferred, but not necessary, for your fighters. The Soulstealer CAN break, so be careful to save before using it.
The Demon Statue, when invoked, lowers your VIT by 1 to a minimum of 3. It also increases your HP! By increasing your HP to around 800-900, you should be able to reliably survive throughout the entire game. You can get multiple Demon Statues by returning to the blood pool.
**5. The Clones **
You have four very difficult clone fights. The "clones" aren't exact duplicates -- the mage will have tiltowait even if you don't! One advantage you can have is to remove members from your party by quitting to town, restarting your party in the maze, but only selecting one or two members. A fighter with the soul stealer glitch can be very useful here.
6. The Sorn
This is the most difficult fight in the game because The Sorn likes to kill your entire party if they aren't buffed by the demon statue to have obscene HP. You have to use Socordi and then wait for the Gatekeeper to remove his shield! If you manage to survive, not get paralyzed, petrified, etc., you are often poisoned at the end and still need to make it home!
To remedy this situation, I'd suggest picking up a Scroll of Latumofis to cure poison before doing the endgame sequence. Alternatively, you can leave one party member behind (like a cleric with Latumofis) and then pick them back up after the battle.
If you're really lucky, you get a potion of Madi. Using one of those to heal your fighter to full after The Sorn is dead is a near guaranteed victory.
7. Text speed
Text is pretty fast, but you can move it to "1" to speed up text quite a bit. This has some disadvantages as you can't read what's happening most of the time, but the option is there!
8. Early Game Gold
No one knows the best way on average to get gold in the early game. The vampire bats, stealing from ironnose, stealing from G'bli, forced door combat, or regular combat grinding are all good strategies with varying amounts of RNG. You want to get to the kettle as quickly as possible and you get the most gold by stealing from G'bli, but need to be a higher level to have a good chance. To get to a higher level you want to kill bats, but the possibiltiy of poison and the length of the combat makes it inefficient at the first sign of trouble. Each reset takes ~15 seconds and you can finish two regular combats that gives you 120+ gold within that time if you're lucky, so save scumming for G'bli might not be the best strategy in general. Someone who spent a lot of time on this could find a lot of timesaves here.
Edit: The now fastest Kettle Kill is 50 seconds from town to Kettle falling off the bottom of the screen! It's rare, but possible.
9. Solo leveling
XP is split amongst your party. Currently, we use a party of 6 to level up as the limiting factor is not XP, but gold, in the early game. That said, reducing your party size to level up the thief faster could be a good way to get more reliable steals which could increase the speed at which you get the scroll of Socordi. Even with reduced HP, with good RNG you could then kill a kettle which would let you into the thieves guild and drastically speed up the early game. That said, you often need cleric levels to heal, the wizard to identify items to sell, and the mage to kill large groups quickly, and fighters are needed early game for sure, so it's difficult to know who to remove from your group and how helpful it will be without doing several runs.
The main "time saves" from leveling are:
Fighters killing things more regularly Cleric being able to cast Dios more (and having more HP) Mage being able to cast Melito (great for killing lizard groups) Wizard being able to cast Dios
