Yes. Upgrade your armor, weapon and other items in Blacksmith. To do this you need to collect many Crystals (best way collecting it from Golem) and need to have enough gold. Weapon +10 will deal more damage than a weapon +1. Armor +10 will protect you better than armor +1.
First of all, thanks for the tips, I really appreciate it. I had a feeling I was missing something vital and now I know what, it's the fact that you can actually upgrade your gearThat's a lot of grind by chance, and exceeding 3 would be at a point where you wouldn't actually need the extra blips of damage.
There's a lot of ways to be stronger:
Bonus Points: You can get 4 extremely fast, or 8 if you start up Iron-man mode and gun it for the nearest achievement bad end
Warrior: dump points into Str/Agi and use the Broadsword+1, which scales better than the Gladius+2 from the spider. Rarely, the low perception will actually be a major detriment, so it's really only good for beating down everything you can actually fight, but just falling victim to the few events that could potentially be a bad end.
Thief: +3 Agi from bonus points, Cat Potion, and just steal all the end-game gear, a few others can do this with bonus points. You generally steal one item less at monster town, even after buying shoes of running to increase your agility before attempting it.
Mage/Enchanter: Nuke everything with Ultra Fire 3+Oil combo. This doesn't work on everything. On Queztl and possibly Iron-man for Mage/Enchanter, just dump all your initial mana into Queztl then use tempo attack/second wind spam with some appropriate blocks, the bleed-stacks and Broadsword+1/Gladius+2 will have enough strength to down her in time. Eat a Ox/Bear/Cat potion before the fight and acquire Heal from Kylira instead of wasting crystals on True/Ultra Heal. Try it out first several times on normal, it's easier to do Number One Hero and Pure Hero in two separate runs.
Grab spam: Some enemies do this while erect, if your agility is higher you can duck and jack them off before they can force you to suck dick.
As for 'best' regardless of Mage's more ideal magic and stat distribution, I prefer Enchanter then maxing out Charisma, for fun, and can still prepare for and fight most encounters with no problem. Although I just dump all my bonus perk points into Agi just because stealing is way more convenient than grinding gold.
Another thing that I never tried was the stealing. Grinding money in this game is a real chore, I've been gathering extra Hunger Charms and selling those just to have food for the party! Stealing stuff just sounds much better.
As for the build suggestions, it's funny to see that I was essentially going for a Grab spam on the more bothersome enemies. In any case I'll definitely try that True Fire + Oil combo, it seems to be fun. Thank you again for the help.