What are your favorite weapons/relics/curses? And your least favorite?

I'm fairly new to the game but I've beaten the end boss on normal difficulty and today completed the first dungeon on hard difficulty. I did a lot of runs though, because I've noticed that I can only beat the harder levels with certain gear. So I'm definitely not one of those guys who can do a run not getting hit, ever. I get hit quite a lot.

What will make a run rather easy for me:
-Incandescent claws and weakening whip with relics for healing from burning enemies and extra damage vs. weakened
-Jaguar hammer with same relic synergies
-Generally any heavy melee weapon with healing properties
-Poison claws also work great if there is some healing from affixes or relics
-Titan Slayer can be great but only with lucky suffixes

Runs that never succeed:
-no healing. Just doesn't work for me
-Using bows, spears, or throwing knives. Those feel just wrong and useless to me. Can't even open secret rooms!
-shields. Parrying is too hit&miss even with a shield

Does anybody use spears or bows? I've not finished a run once with such a weapon.

My worst curses are the one that reduces stamina, or the one that replaces normal healing with Bloodlust, when I just stacked a number of great healing effects from my gear. Ugh!

When I do have good healing, I actually love getting the curse where you pay with HP instead of corruption for upgrades. Basically free upgrades all the way!

I also like getting the one where you get permanent haste and only have to kill 50 enemies to get rid of the extra vulnerability to damage.