Phoenicis
Savage's Husband
Try mixing caster, melee and ranged lives.ok, but you don't actually need to optimize gear for leveling. For instance, using the same set of gear for a barb life and a monk one is fine, you just need to switch armor and replace strength gear with wisdom one. As for the inventory space, that's what mules are for. I keep one alt for lvl 5 melee gear, 1 for lvl 10 ranged gear, etc...
It's only at cap that you need to play gear tetris, and if you're focused on past life grinding, you probably won't spend much time at cap.
Yes, low level stuff is pretty generic, starting about lvl ten it begins to diverge...