NG+ Options / Difficulty options.

[Own]

Difficulties:

Chill Difficulty: Shields rapidly repair after a break. HP is doubled and health potions refill rapidly even without attacking. Bosses have far less defense and deal less damage. Can be downgraded into, but not upgraded out of.
Hardcore Difficulty: Permadeath. You cannot teleport out of boss battles (but what does that matter if you can just save and quit, unless it puts you right back in the fight...?). Enemies are deadlier, but your Perfect Guards dramatically empower your next attack, allowing for fights to be far quicker with Perfect Guard synergy.

Modifiers:

Oops, All Elites: Every enemy that can spawn as an elite will spawn as one.
Oops, All Super-Elites: Any enemy that can spawn as an elite instead spawns as a super elite.
Grindea Take The Wheel: Starting the game locks all skills, spells and utilities except for one melee skill, one magic spell and one utility ability chosen at random. Beat the game using this randomized hybrid combo.
Summon Master: Start the game with a special Slime Staff equipped, whose MATK scales with your level. You deal 0 damage with all melee attacks and magic missiles. You can only put points into Cloud, Snowman and Plants.

Anyone else have any ideas?

 

[Own]

I can't believe it didn't come to me sooner. The perfect difficulty option is already in the game. Teddy added it into the game years ago as a means to prevent player skill softlocks due to an inability to grind.

Every time you die to Black Ferrets in the Collectors HQ they get a stacking penalty to all stats. My suggestion?

Normal, Adaptive and Hard, Adaptive difficulty options, with the latter not counting towards the Hard Mode Achievement. These gives the standard difficulty of Normal and Hard, but with a stacking removal of 2-5% from the HP, Defense and Damage from bosses every time you die to them. Maintained across saving and quitting.

This means that people can overcome bosses eventually if they lack the skill, purely through dying. Every restart becomes a little bit easier until it hits a point that they can handle the boss.