Are you making full use of the items you find, or are you dying with an inventory of wands/scrolls/potions that you were saving for a rainy day? One of the things to do is to identify items when you have some safety. One way to do that is to use the wands on enemies. Sometimes you do end up wasting a charge or empowering the enemy, but then you know what the thing does. And after a few runs you'll have a sense for something like "I've identified a lot of the 'good' scrolls, so its more likely the unidentified ones are 'bad' ones"