Hi there! I first wanted to say thanks for making this game; As a vet of Isaac and danmaku shmups, I'm having an absolute blast with it. And I really appreciate the changes to lasers and mortars and the relic rebalancing in this most recent update. Good work!

That said, I was thinking today during some runs about other balance concerns that remain in the wake of this update. Namely, that items that change your firing to a burst/flurry are basically useless. Actually, apart from these, I'm impressed by the useFULness of almost all the item pool now. But several times, picking up something like the Brain From Afar or a similar item such as some of the staves has completely killed a great run, to the point that I've turned auto-pickup back off so as to better avoid them. I don't think "roll runs until you hit the sweet run with the good items" is your intent with this game, at least it doesn't feel as though that's the case. Most runs feel viable, especially after this most recent set of changes.

Granted, these items tend to also increase your damage, but the nature of the game revolves around the management of hordes of enemy "popcorn" (smaller, less dangerous enemies that die quickly but are deadly in numbers) while prioritizing larger or more dangerous targets at the same time, similar to a danmaku STG. And reducing the player's rate of fire so dramatically is a bad idea. No matter how much you increase damage to compensate, you remove the player's ability to manage popcorn waves, essentially killing them or, in the best case, turning a fast-paced run into a tedious slog.

Maybe you could consider a change for these items similar to what we have in the Ruby sword(s)? That item works in the opposite way, decreasing the player's damage but changing their shot to a wider spread of fire with higher rate, essentially like changing the player's ship from Type-A to Type-C in a dodonpachi series game. It still works, because you can still manage popcorn, now you just have to focus more consciously on taking care of "carriers" (enemies like cultists, star children, elites and minibosses etc).

If, rather than packing all the shots that would have been fired during a given period of time into one burst with no shots in between, you just scaled back the effect a little so that the player's stream of fire is never forced to actually stop, that might fix it. Maybe just an added-on burst fire effect every so often, like with many of the other items that add freezing or plague or fear shots to the existing stream of fire, would work as well. I'm not sure!

Another suggestion I had concerning special enemies like the Gray Gug for instance, or the item guardians, would be to put a health bar on screen for them. If they're important enough to warrant a displayed name, it feels strange to me that they don't also have health bars. This is more of a personal taste thing. Maybe it's intended that you don't know how long you have until they're dead, I don't know, haha.

Also, I found a typo. On the Mask of Anubis item, "subtley" should be "subtly".

Anyway, sorry about rambling on and on. Keep up the good work!