What's your "safe" strategy?

I'm still pretty early into the game, but I've been trying to put together a strategy that minimizes RNG from run to run. For that reason I'm doing satyr/skeleton/mystic. Force bolt gives me a guaranteed weapon that'll carry for a long time, skeleton means I don't have to worry about food, and mystic means I've got identify from the start and can churn through every item, buy out every vendor, etc. I also use the blessed hallucination potion to get a stack of blessed waters going.

However, while this strategy feels more consistent in terms of not running into hard roadblocks, I've been finding that after the gnome king I tend to run into trouble with enemies taking and dealing too much damage for me to cope with. If I play perfectly I can keep going, but if I get tired at all and stop thinking strategically it doesn't take much for the run to be over. For that reason, I'm trying to figure out how to reliably get quickness or some kind of armor onto the build every run, though the low strength makes that really tough.

People say this combo is the most consistent strategy, but is there something else I could be doing? Most of my human paladin runs end pretty quickly, but if I get the right gear it ends up feeling a lot more survivable because weapon damage doesn't peak as fast as force bolt and he can wear heavy armor easily.