Thanks for the comments Bulboculus! I'm glad you liked it! During development most monsters would 1 shot me. So I had some really strong items to compensate for that, but because they drop at random, sometimes you could kill a few monsters and other times you'd just have no luck. So when I toned down the monsters before "release", I didn't go and adjust the items to match. Near the end I also added a heal/mana regen after each round of combat, which I think could be tuned to make it feel a little more like you're getting run down as you progress.