This game is incredibly sticky; I've sunk a frankly embarrassing amount of time into it in the past two months. I've tried a wide variety of builds, including using the cauldron to farm for golden whetstones. Floors 16 and 17 always end my run, all thanks to Status Effects. Poison and Burn scale SO HIGH, SO FAST that they're nigh impossible to counter. That said, I only run into this problem so often because I play the game so much, which I keep doing because it's pretty dang fun up until that point.