I've been doing fine with SS and cleric. Equiping the cleric has been cheaper so far, but SS is cheap enough!
IMHO herbalist/cleric is rly easy all the way up to 44 (just get staff of the avenger as early as u can, should be worth 35-50k), being able to kill ninja moles the fastest. So I started leveling my cleric first, then I used her to plvl my hunter/SS unitil it was around lv43 (at this point the cleric started to have more a support role than plvler, grinding lv42 wolves and lv45 archers @Icicle with the SS as the main dmg source).
Although hunter/SS can do fine alone, it's rly good to have a support, this way you can go to higher level mobs early. Atm, my SS is 7 1/2 levels ahead of the cleric.
Regardin equipment...
Herbalist skeletar chests cost me about 10k each, while hunter chests cost me about 15k.
Never used incantation chests, those are expensive as fck and not worth it at all, I stayed with skeletar and lv35 unseals until lv50, tho if u rly want a lv40 chest weapon, you can try killing skeletal archer miniboss, hopefully no one is farming it round the clock (happened to me).
Eva chests for cleric cost me about 5k each. Eva chests for SS cost me around 13k each.
Haven't looked for enigmas for cleric, but SS ones are cheap enough, I got mines around 15k, tho I think they are a bit more costly normally. Tho atm I'm using lv55 unseal equipment, which was rly cheap, 900k armor, 950k gun, 1m unsealed boots (I saw for 750k but didn't have money at the moment, later I could only find for 1M and was desperate for some movement speed hehe) and 400k sealed gloves (I bought them to unseal them later, for the movement speed).
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I'd also consider champion & seal maaster for mazes, their equipments are the cheapest, but u shouldn't make a SM your first char.
Voyager can sell plvl and go to mazes allright, but he's also expensive, albeit not as much as a crus.