Way to handle the ice golems as ranger is strafe attack. Keep at least one melee weapon drop, equip it, stand diagonal from golem. Move away 1 straight (not diagonal). It will follow you, you will hit with melee, it will not hit you. Repeat until it's dead. If you get super unlucky with RNG and don't have any melee weapons run away diagonal and ditch it somewhere. Consumable if you have to but you probably don't.
After playing way too many games think I'm pretty confident what the tier list is:
1) Ranger, Rogue - Top because strength build with evasive + either rogue's full suite of individually good but not broken abilities or STRAFE on ranger can take pretty much any RNG and is robust to player error.
2) Enchanter, Necromancer - Laugh at item RNG. Easiest to learn. More fragile than tier 1.
3) Storm Mage - Stands a bit better than the other elemental mages due to absence of many electric-resist enemies and power of shock.
4) Ice Mage, Fire Mage, Warrior - More sensitive to RNG and require resource conservation (applies to storm mage too). Warrior is more error tolerant than the elemental mages but also more RNG dependent.
5) Barbarian. One trick pony. That trick is the best in the game (STRAFE), but bad at everything else. No mana bar and no timed activated ability recharge are both really painful.
Barbarian makes resource conservation much more difficult than other classes since you basically just have HP and don't naturally recharge abilities. Need to figure out how to abuse strafe attack to make it work, or lucky RNG. Weakest class by far.
If anyone is curious, 15 win streak was done with thief. Build is 1. stealth 2. evasive 3/4. evasive 2 / smoke bomb 1 (order depending on whether ranged enemies are present) and then playing it by ear depending on items and the level 9 tome drop. Strength with attributes, fortitude with skill points. The build is weaker than necromancer or enchanter but more reliable due to the higher hit points and evasive. Beyond all the normal tricks (kiting enemies over bad terrain, carrying enemies through the stairs one by one to deal with otherwise unbeatable mobs) I also made one major playstyle change to avoid deaths, and that was not to attempt the arcane tower (which is much more dangerous than the other bonus dungeons) without having reached level 13 first + having a fear or hellfire scroll incase things still go upside down.
Thats just crazy man, congrats :) Interestingly, I know one of the guys on the discord did a 12 win streak early on with warrior and I believe he said roughly the same thing i.e. the higher hit points makes him significantly more reliable with repeated plays. Its pretty neat imo that the classes that are considered easiest to get a first win i.e. necro, enchanter, ranger, are not the same as would excel in win streaks.
Game is optimized for excellent replayability, but not for balance or ease of learning. If you get through the string of losses at the start you'll have a lot of fun trying each class out and with the run-to-run differences based on gear and map generation.
To do that, play one of the stronger classes (enchanter or necromancer) to start, do ranger after winning with one of those two, and after winning as the ranger move on to the more difficult melee classes and/or elemental mages.
Finally, figuring out which monsters move on diagonals and which don't and using the knowledge for kiting and getting the AI to walk over environmental hazards is a key skill and the game gets drastically easier (still a challenge) when you get good at this.
Great advice, pretty much spot on. I've had trouble balancing a lot of things simply in that, once the strategies you've mentioned (and many others) are understood and mastered, the game becomes much easier. So I've always tried to balance so that the game is challenging with the assumption that all of the little tricks are being exploited to their fullest. Of course, unfortunately, this makes the game seem impossible hard for new players if they haven't figured out some of these things. I think the necromancer and enchanter are seemingly so much easier simply in that they don't have to take advantage of so many of these tricks, as in their kit alone tends to be enough.
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Thats just crazy man, congrats :) Interestingly, I know one of the guys on the discord did a 12 win streak early on with warrior and I believe he said roughly the same thing i.e. the higher hit points makes him significantly more reliable with repeated plays. Its pretty neat imo that the classes that are considered easiest to get a first win i.e. necro, enchanter, ranger, are not the same as would excel in win streaks.