As an expert not very good player, I don't believe any rebalancing is necessary. I still manage to die quite easily with any of these variants. I suppose one solution is for me to record videos so that Misery can watch my misery and then see he and I do not see the world in equal parts.
The problem (probably) isn't that I can't do it. It is that I just stop caring about precision movement halfway through the game. A couple of those 'Meh" moments and I'm dead.
Well, see, that's part of the problem.
The reason why many players would just be outright immortal with regenerating health is because they *would* be still doing all the dodging, even if they're not too good at it. But any hits they took, they could just suck it up and regen and then dive back in. The ONLY things in the game that could probably stop them in this case would be the major heavy-hitters like Terminus as it's currently balanced (nothing to hide behind in it's room, and it hits like a freight train). But 95% of the game isn't giant solo boss monsters.
Yeah, the only way I can see it working is if we have a Cheat Code menu that disables achievements. We could put all kinds of different options in then. SHMUP mode only changes how the control method works in a very small way, it's more of a nicety as an input option. Brawler mode would completely break the standard balance of the game, though.
If you guys want to put stuff like that in a big cheat menu, that's fine by me. You can come up with other loopy things if you'd like, too. Cheat menus are fine. They're usually hidden (or half-hidden) somehow though?
Have any cheats used appear on the results screens. You know, at the end of the game and between rooms. Heck, display any incredibilities taken, while we're at it (since with those it's like, hey, you managed it while this horrible thing was turned on!).
Might I suggest another option? Keep health and shields as they are now, but have the player automatically suck up available health when they need it moving to a new room. This prevents unwanted backtracking.
Wouldn't work with this type of game really. A lot of pickups, including health, are placed behind traps, bombables, or whatever. So with pretty much every game in this genre it means that just because a pickup is there, you cant necessarily get at it without danger or spending resources (and sucking them in would break that). I suspect this is a big part of why the devs of Enter the Gungeon came up with their warp system; it's certainly a huge reason as to why we're now using a similar mechanic. To make the backtracking much faster, since there's no real way to totally avoid it.