Don’t bother with melee, FIMA punishes the melee playstyle. In basic melee fights you are forced to trade blows with enemies and with each new chapter enemies hit harder and harder but your armor can’t keep up, you will end up taking too much damage from each encounter and slowly but surely lose. There are ways to make melee work (like bolas kiting, armband, chillkiting, ranged melee + haste/flow, etc) and deal one-sided damage but it’s more practical to just play ranged

Ranged runs inherently don’t have to trade blows, for the most part they will hit enemies from afar and kill them before they can get close and scratch you. I think the two easiest ways to win fima are sniper with upgraded throwables, and wandmonk

The best strategy for this challenge is to avoid taking damage for melee enemies. There are some tatics… the most useful is to find a Ring of Speed + ranged weapon augmented for speed attacks. It requires a bit of luck but you can achieve this combination by other ways, like flux enchantment (that one the makes you fastest on water) + ranged weapon or projectile enchanted weapon.

Relics that creates distance between you and enemies are also high valuable (Bracelet, Hourglass, Ethereal Chains [GOAT]) Indeed there many forms to loose enemies, but what you need most is a ranged weapon. The Runer Spec is a bit good for creates distance while on runing stance, and the aditional evasion can save you from unexpected hits (dont abuse it, the evasion will not save you as much as we think)

I respectfully disagree about only using throwing weapons, because at hight levels they dont do much, soon or later you will need a good weapon

Found a Stone Scale Armor at level 9, just what I wanted to try…

A Mail armor of Entanglement has worked quite well around FIMO, dropping it after fighting Tengu to put Evasion + Stone to the test…