I got a few snowballs in an elemental build. The health is really luck to me. After a few solid weapons a single ghost scepter spot has helped me in the past but I wouldn't start with it.

Focus building HP, it'll be a primo level-up pick: you're already getting tons of damage stats for free and you don't need to build up that nearly as much elsewhere.

Any weapon that scales well with flat damage is a good pick. Dual-scaling options like Lightning Shiv are a natural choice, but standard options like SMG will work very well too.

Apprentice didn't give me that much trouble compared to other toons. You don't really have to think too much about offence as your lvl's naturally take care of it.

I went with a mix of ghost flint and thief dagger to start (scaling attack speed and income). Focused on defensive stats and luck. When presented pick the weapons with better and multiple scaling like lightning swords.

Items like Nail and the elemental one (forgot the name) which adds extra engineering and elemental scaling to weapons are insanely good, it make use of the natural damage you get each lvl's. The book that gives you engineering equals to elemental also makes you double dip on elemental scaling (also snowball)

Tried starting with ghost flint like Demethrite said. Two different runs it ended up being successful.

The flint made it more likely ghost scepter would show, so as possible I combo'd the flint down to 1 slot, had scepter across the other five and kept raising them up until wave nine or so where I took any other weapon, ranged, melee, elemental. One run the first non-ethereal gear was a blue spud gun so I went with that. By level 15 my speed was well over 150 so even with a red flint, I dumped that, had a red scepter on 1 slot and then went with a mix of ranged and melee.

And... it was basically the same concept in the second run. Before/around wave 9/10 I looked to work in a melee/ranged/elemental. Landed a purple particle accelerator... which obv. went well. I dumped the flint on wave 28 for a lightning sword. still had my red scepter on wave 30 where I 'won' but my health was well above 100 before hitting wave 20. I kept getting buffers instead of weapons otherwise I would've dumped that one earlier for more damage.

Pretty reliable to start with flint tho and plan to swap in almost any other category with it around wave 9 (the money round).

Git gud

Just go melee and get primitive weapons
Also get high luck to get high HP rolls when you level up!

As others have mentioned, he kind of flips the script a bit. You get more damage than you'll probably ever need just from leveling up, so you'll need to spend on the HP to not die. You can in fact go to 0 if you aren't careful!