Somehow got top XP without really going for it. I was the few that prepped more Glyphs instead of Quest Items, and that made all the difference: ENDISWAL and IMAWAL spawned near the entrance, and there's no Platemail in the shop pool, so I was able to skirt around debilitating effects for most of the game.
My run was in no way optimized -- I was forced to convert IMAWAL and later ENDISWAL both quite early, and started on the Tower way too early, resulting in using up all the blood pools in the SMM fight and didn't get to enter the secret subdungeon. I'll simply stick the screenshot here as a reference: