Some questions about Necrodancer:
-Miner's Cap: Is it a trap? It looks like a trap. Not being able to dig to skip a beat hurts a lot, even with a weapon with a good area of effect.
-Ring of Phasing: I've gotten it a couple of times with the dagger of phasing just for the sake of trying the combo. In theory, you should be immortal in standard levels. In practice, I never last long. Is it just because I suck or is it because it's not as good as it sounds?
-Is there any reliable way for Eli to beat King Konga without suffering massive amounts of damage?
-What sort of items do you look for? I tend to go for a good rapier, an offensive ring, anti-ooze boots, and the best armour I come across, but will usually settle for whatever else I can get.
Miner's Cap: It's not great if all you want high survivability, yeah. For speedrunning certain characters though, it's such a strong item that it was banned from the recent Melody CoNDOR (a racing tournament). For me personally, on Cadence, dig-buffering is not super duper important, so I'll take Miner's Cap if I have nothing better for the slot and am going fast.
Ring of Phasing: This is a really hard item to use and I still don't take it. For speedrunning, it is elite level because it trivializes zone 4 if you know how to use it. Some have proposed removing it or reworking it for that reason (
http://braceyourselfgames.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2926), but that seems unlikely to happen at an official level. What I've gathered by watching high level streams is that you want to be using bombs and/or fireball (blood magic if necessary) to kill minibosses from inside the wall, then scoot to the exit.
I've never seriously tried Eli, so no ideas there.
Items to look for: I've been practicing Cadence racing recently, where my current target is hitting times of about 10-15 minutes reliably without dying. For that, I like to ideally have: any armor that's chainmail or better; some sort of regen (ring of regen, crown of thorns, heal spell) or simply a ton of hearts; at least 2 damage, ideally boostable to 3 for opening crates (war drum is nice for this if your weapon is titanium); decent attack pattern (really anything except dagger, broadsword, and especially whip; though jeweled dagger is pretty good), with rapier often the best; any torch; ooze boots; Lucky Charm; 3 (ideally 4) bombs to accelerate the final boss. There are a lot of good rings, so that slot is contested: Ring of Courage, Ring of Regen, Ring of Peace, Ring of Mana (bonkers with Freeze, Fireball, or Shield).