Any% no fire wand is Neutopia's low% category. It's a very different game without the powerful fire wand. This TAS beats my RTA WR by 14 minutes! I save time by skipping upgrades, damage boosting, manipulating items drops, and using lots of bombs. While making this TAS, I found out that you can evade enemies in certain spots by simply holding a diagonal direction against a wall to be a few pixels closer to the wall.
feos: Rejecting this one as well, because there's a huge improvement that could be applied throughout the entire run, explained in this post.
Taking more damage is not necessarily a silver bullet, because not all enemies that you'd want to damage boost from are going at you, so sometimes it's faster to go around them. Still worth a closer look just like turning.
The branch itself would most likely be acceptable for Moons if optimized.