About early game - just run through first location at p4, open chests and pick staffs/wands with skills and throwing weapon for selling. Gamble for more staffs/wands till level 8 and sell them again, as you get some gold try to gamble Death Combo(gloves/belt from set) or first unique belt(with 10MDR it eliminate most of damage from shamans/rats etc
), first unique armor for free resists etc. You can gamble ~90% of all uniques/sets if your character level allow it. Use javelins from start and hire javelin merc at lvl 8(if you don't play on hard difficult ofc - otherwise she will kill you more often then regular mobs). Farm griswold for gamble charm and upgrade it with gem shrines(you can use multiple those charms with different values of reducing prices). There's a lot more tricks but i forget them - abandoned this mod after second beta 1.60 which implemented high stat requiments on gear and never start again.
i read about gambling "trick" but i did not use, because it sounds like cheating same trick as throw weapons + rune in median. I see that my difficulty is easy at the moment, but i don't see how to change it...
