Quen also makes playing glass cannon extremely easy unless you deliberately avoid using it for sake of challenge. (Of course it's up to personal preferences how much of annoyance being a scrooge is and mods exists for a good reason.)
I ran with lvl1 Skellington rog I found until I crafted something better at lvl11, and kept that until I decided to make improved feline armour and switched to feline gear in general. Besides, buying directly from merchants is pretty stupid when you can make equal or better gear with crafting for much better price, and common parts for crafting are really easy to come by. Weapon that barely has any mods in it is cheap to repair, one with plenty of mods and rune slots can be insanely expensive to repair if you keep trashing them all the time. There are many ways to save coin in the game anyway, and one more practical ones is to save good weapons for dangerous encounters. By the time I finished most of Novigrad's sidequests I was swimming in near-five digit total of coins at lvl20. That is chiefly a problem early on in the game. you would not need to loot everything to scrape together enough money to buy stuff and enjoy the game more. you should get the mod on nexus for the wealthy vendors n better prices. Meditation does not heal on the last 2 difficulties.
