I have a bad habit of making loadouts with the sole purpose of serving me through an entire run without help. It's not hard after you learn what arcana can do, and how cloaks and relics can break them.

For example, shock assault makes you borderline untouchable while you mercilessly bully everything on screen, and then add insult to injury by causing the shock status effect, giving you time to reassess after using the attack. Did I mention it counts as a melee attack? Slap the awe cloak, dark katana, and whatever crit relics you can get on it and you've got yourself an aimbot.

Not impressed? Let me tell you about cooldowns. Head on over to the cursed shop in the plaza and pick up a chaotic pendulum, you'll immediately notice something terribly wrong as you're now able to use shock assault over, and over, and over...
The cooldown for shock assault starts immediately after use, and if you have it in your signature slot, the attack and debuff will last long enough for you to use it again before the enemies even have a chance to realize whats happening. As long as you keep in mind that you're not REALLY immune to damage when using shock assault, you'll basically never get hit. Chaotic pendulum makes it so that cooldown is reduced for both you and enemies, but if they're constantly being stunned by the attack, then it doesn't really matter does it?

A lot of curses rely on increasing the damage you receive, or halving stats in order to punish you. It doesn't take much thought to notice how easy it is to null these negative effects.

The fall cloak is a favorite of mine when it comes to messing around with curses, the crippling 100 health with the ability to heal automatically opens up a lot of game-breaking possibilities. All those relics that only work at full health are useful for once, and relics that negatively effect your health do nothing. You can easily grab the broken plague flask at the plaza for a free and powerful buff.

What really breaks this cloak is the limited edition robe. Damage will only cost 10% of your max health, so you will only ever take 10 damage in a single hit. Cursed relics that increase the amount of damage you take is now free game, because no matter what you will always only die in 10 hits. There's nothing quite like having double toil, double trouble, glass cannon, and paronomasicon all at once.
Of course, in a game where i-frames don't exist, 10 hits is really not a lot, it's basically just a slightly generous pride cloak.

This is my go-to loadout, it uses the covert ops mask trick with a little twist, this one is aesthetically pleasing. This loadout exists with the sole purpose of abusing every opportunity available to me and getting as many damage/crit bonuses that god will allow.

Jeremiah's needle and tipsy gladius are such memes with this loadout, because the debuffs don't even matter. Covert ops mask will always give 100% crits upon evading an attack. Mercenary's dagger or golden saber of envy are free to grab thanks to the extra gold from avarice cloak. The infamous toil/trouble masks are less risky. There's plenty standard relics that break this loadout too, who doesn't love dice of the nemesis with a 100% crit loadout? Vampire eyeglasses are just fun, and so is assassin's blade. Retro floor plan is another fun curse, because when combined with the avarice cloak you end up having 900+ gold on floor 2. It's almost always guaranteed that I'll find a relic that works really well with this setup.

The arcana I picked don't really matter as much, but are worth mentioning because earth arcana just crushes the hopes and dreams of any enemy that dares to oppose you. Obsidian splitter does so much damage AND it destroys projectiles without the need for flak gauntlet, it makes it really easy to get signature charge while you evade every attack thrown at you.

It's quite an experience to look at curse of the forager and think "this is a good idea."
Credit to a Raccoon for teaching me the ways of curse addiction.

V everyone in the comments section is a genius + I love you + screw jk rowling XDDXDDXddxd V