So I'm just coming off the back of a 1000 floor tower conquest with some degree of scaling slightly above standard (total 3.5x modifier I believe) and there are some concerns I have about scaling.
Firstly, the game desperately needs some logarithmic scaling. It's far too easy to cap out certain parts of the game and trivialize most of it while other parts of the game are rather punishing due to a lack of logarithmic scaling.
Let's start with the simplest topic at hand: Curses. Why are there curses that basically say "If you have 10 levels of this, you will never get any AP again" while other curses are totally fine even if you have some 40+ stacks of them if your stats are high enough to just tank the raw damage? Curses that lower your ability to do things should all have logarithmic scaling by default. The chance to gain AP might approach zero but it should never reach it, just constantly getting another 10% less likely relative to the previous value.
I would do away entirely with the concept of a max stamina curse (btw can we have an accessory that increases your max stamina?) and instead introduce a curse that reduces the amount of stamina gained from any source by a percentage, that, again, scales logarithmically.
Conversely, curses that increase enemy damage should probably scale exponentially, but that's a whole other conversation to have.
As it stands right now, there are curses that are basically free to take, some others you should never take and some (the armor one) where the initial investment is basically free, especially if you have a good source of armor break (In my run I just used windy knuckles without any armor breaking techniques because I never rolled any high level ones)
Speaking of, Windy Knuckles (I know, the item has been fixed, reworked, fixed again, and nerfed for an eternity) scale really badly. Firstly, they can hit a cap of 100%. So if you ever hit 150 agility, you can just keep hitting the enemy until you run out of stamina. Logarithmic scaling would again fix this, but even if you do not want to introduce logarithmic scaling for this item in particular (or at all, honestly) I still believe, the item needs some sort of rework. Namely giving it a base value, say, instead of 0.7xagi, make it scale like 25+0.5xagi. It still maxes out at 150 agi, but at the very least the item becomes somewhat useable at the lower agi range, as opposed to the current situation where it's basically useless unless you want to cheese the game with absurdly high agility.
Lastly, I feel like the CON attribute scales a bit too well. Now, there seems to be some degree of diminishing returns going on but the ability to just cap it out at 99% reduction made me tank hits at over 100 levels of addiction and multiple levels of corruption at lust curse level 35 with barely any measurable result. Maybe logarithmic scaling would, again, be a better solution here. As it stands, even with the diminishing returns in place, those final points of resistance are extremely valuable because the final points towards 99 resistance represent a massive leap in efficacy.
That does it for logarithmic scaling but now we need to address the elephant in the room:
Heart pendant is by far the most busted accessory in the game for climbing the tower, not even close. No other item allows you to just infinitely farm enemies that rely on an endless loop of physical attacks like Theresa for AP. The ability to regenerate hp on its own already makes it really busted in the tower where there are no natural sources of healing but the fact that it can do so mid combat and repeatedly just makes it utterly broken.
There are two solutions that come to mind, one is a nerf, the other a complete rework.
The nerf would be to simply introduce a special debuff that is applied for a number of turns scaling with the percentage of your max hp that was restored (something like a turn for every 25% of hp restored would be a good idea) that turns off AP gain for those turns. While this doesn't solve the issue of infinite AP farming entirely, it puts a bit of a lid on it on higher levels of the hp damage curse at least, which previously was another one of those "basically free picks". In my run it was at like level 40 and I still regularly farmed opponents for AP though I had to stop doing it with Autumn because her playful slaps became a bit too intense for my liking and there was a very real risk that the random nature of the pendant might screw me over.
The total rework would be to change it from a random heal on using the wait action to a guaranteed heal whenever you enter a combat.
Another concern I have with tower runs is that the enemies are very skewed. Some are basically free wins while others are extremely challenging. Of course some enemies just aren't built for a monster with massively inflated stats. Nothing you can feasibly do to Cassandra is ever gonna make her able to deal with a monster that can foresee her every move. Maybe she should just be removed from the pool of tower fights entirely. But a lot of opponents are just built with being a massive hp sponge being their primary factor and they have excessively long taunting phases where they do nothing at all. Many bosses as well as a lot of the Shemale enemies, Dakota in particular, fall into this territory. She monologues for multiple turns of combat, then comes an addiction check, if you fail that one, there is ANOTHER turn transition where there happens nothing and only then will you be hit with the dominated status, assuming she is still alive, which she definitely isn't. Maybe what's needed is just a new mechanic in general where enemies skip the gloating and go straight to their combat moves when their hp drops below a certain threshold.
Because I don't only want to take away everyone's toys, could we have a rest room in the tower? Basically, whenever the tower goes "all enemies defeated", can we get a free rest? The ability to get at least some amount of in-built healing would lessen the reliance on heart pendant and possibly open up some other accessories to be viable.
EDIT: Forgot to say, what ultimately killed the run was running into an enemy that did a corruption check before the battle even began and instantly broke me. That's a rather disappointing end to any run. Maybe that could be tweaked, too.