Strategy

Early levels should stabilize movement, sustain, and one reliable damage pattern before you chase luxury picks.
Boss windows are map gates. Saving cooldowns and chest gold for the map boss is usually stronger than overbuying early.
Endless mode widens the spawn pool and increases pressure. Treat the 30-minute clear as the planned win condition.
Runes belong to Paladin, Druid, and Sorcerer builds; Knight progression is balanced around weapon and combat-spell uptime.

Progress Anchors

Normal monster spawn times below are baseline director timings with no extra level/kill acceleration. Real runs can surface monsters earlier if the player snowballs, and entering the next map after a boss clear now adds four minutes of director pressure immediately.
Monster kills award XP and shared gold, but equipment now comes from chests only. Gold resets when a new map starts, while both gold earned and chest costs rise by 34% per map. Chests are opened by walking over them; normal chests roll the full rarity table, rare chests force rare-or-better equipment, and legendary chests force epic-or-better equipment.
The normal clear is now six wrapped maps. Map 6 unlocks ascension, but the run does not end: stepping back onto the cleared gate opens Map 7, Map 8, and so on. Endless maps keep rolling the final chest band and keep raising monster spawn rate each map.