After playing for maximum score on 6 challenges forever, I finally bit the bullet and went for a 9 challenge perfect score run. This general strategy got me there in surprisingly few tries:

• Pick Huntress for the spirit bow. The combination of no armor and almost no healing means we can’t afford to melee past sewers. Later we pick Sniper for extra vision and armor piercing bow, Warden is sadly gutted due to the Barren Lands challenge.
• Fish for a Ring of Haste as much as possible (always pick rings from crystal chest and pick the chest room behind crystal doors; transmute other rings).
• All upgrade scrolls go into the Ring of Haste.
• Once we’ve got haste up and running, kiting is the name of the game. Use vision (Rejuvenating Steps and Heightened Senses talents are amazing) and trick shots to deal with ranged threats.
• All healing potions go into energy, we’ll use alchemy to get past Tengu, and the King of Dwarves. Keep an Elixir of Feather Fall around to safely do pit rooms.
• Skip sacrificial altars for the ascent, and save 3-4 Scrolls of Magic Mapping for the ascent as well. We’ll turn them into Scrolls of Foresight and comb every regular floor for full exploration score.

Potions of Shrouding Fog trivialize Tengu, who is otherwise a huge obstacle for a 9 challenge run. The new bombs also feel great, they do decent damage and have good utility. I used a couple of them to beat down the final phase of the dwarf king. Finally, once you make it all the way down to Yog he actually falls wuite easily to the bow 🙂 One thing I didn’t think of was to pick up the darts from the shops, and craft some blinding darts - they’d have saved me a lot of headache against scorpios and warlocks.

I will say that 9 challenges is a lot less fun than 6 challenges, so I’ll probably go back to that. Barren Lands in particular feels like it makes the game less interesting, disabling plants entirely just removes so many tools from the player.