I've noticed that most spell icons tend to look the same, so by mid-game I might have 3 blast icons and two belt icons and 2 sword icons in my bar.
That's an issue that I tried my best to solve but still didn't quite manage to. I actually changed how the spell icons worked several times, but it's really hard to make them look distinct without having literally hundreds of special cases, which would be too much work.
Didn't end with rune duplicates, even if some of them were nearly un-usable (because of other runes being really similair except better in nearly every case).
That's what I was thinking about when talking about duplicate runes, you'll probably end up with some runes that basically do the same but worse than other runes. It's the whole reason I added the option to drop runes, that was the laziest 'solution' I could think of xD
So you guys did take that inspiration from DC:SS! It's great you put stair-dancing in. Was really surprising the first time I dodged down some stairs to heal and a mage went down as well.
Yes by far the biggest inspiration is DC:SS, stair dancing seems like a small feature but I really like it, makes the whole 'moving to the next floor' part much more fun.
Interestingly enough it seems I also took a lot of inspiration from ToME for the flux system and the effects that reserve some of your FP, since I was actually playing some ToME at the time I designed it (I think), but I completely forgot until someone pointed it out, since I don't play it very often xD
By the way, right now I changed the runes you keep when you die from 1-4 (depending on your level), to 2-4. I'm still not sure if I want to add a more complex system to managing runes, as has been suggested, because it would add more complexity to starting a new run, and it wouldn't be TOO different. Hopefully it helps at least a little bit to feel like you aren't losing everything you have on the first few levels.
Also, thank you all for your feedback, I'm very glad you're having fun with my game