What a good game, I started a new save as a way to have a fresh experience with the complete patch and I'm amazed at how easier the game becomes when you have prior knowledge, I managed to, in the first lap, kill all bosses and optional super bosses with the exception of the gigantic fish and the old king, so I'll give some advice.
-Resurrecionist's Ring is the strongest defensive item in the game, hands down. Shure, you can imitate it's effects with spells, but its annoying to maintain those effects and having them always active helps a lot, specially the crit immunity. In this game crits do 3 times the normal amount of damage, so against some enemies, a crit is the difference between life and death.
-Attack builds are WAAAY stronger than Magic builds, this game has a lot of unique atk buffs that stack mutiplicatively with each other, like Phalanx and Madness, so you'll end up with a ridiculous amount of atk and your normal attacks will out damage all spells, however, if you want a challenge or want to have some fun you can still do somethin with magic builds, just unlock and fully upgrade the Wand of R'lyeh, or be prepared to spend a lot of money buying Node's watches.
-Always keep in mind that your enemys turns also lower the cooldown in your skills, you can exploit this with requiem. If your enemy is faster than you, but not fast enough to kill you before you can react, you can use skills and weapons that lower your speed (like phalanx, stone flesh and Miranda's axe) to become unkillable.
-Miranda's axe might just be the strongest weapon in the game, it literally allows you to ignore game mechanics and go full unga bunga. DSK Anchor is a close second.
-There is a speed cap, and I dont mean the stat itself but its effect, I dont know the exact numbers, but be sure that there is no difference between you having 1000 speed and you having 8000, you wont be outspeeding anyone nor will anyone do that to you.
-I dont know what the fuck GRD Up does nor do i know what's the difference between small and extra large, I recommend to only use guns because using them is a free action that doesn't consume a turn and the damage scales pretty good with your attack, also you will never need to use multiple breaks in a turn, not even against the old king who's got the most break intensive fight in the game.