I've played over a couple hundred hours of this game and gotten tired enough of some of the systems that I made up arbitrary rules to replace them, here's how I recommend playing the game if you want something a little more balanced and consistent:
>use the mod linked here >>15225482 and set your level to 200. NO HIRING PAWNS unless they are appropriately equipped and leveled for your area
>set your health/attack stats to whatever feels right for the general part of the game you're at and you can pretty much always keep defenses at 0 since they break the balance. By BBI since you have no defense you should probably roll with 9999 health.
>being at max level removes the free heals on levelups, since you won't be leveling up, and now by choosing to never use consumable health items you will only heal fully by resting
>don't bother with anodyne, get 999 orbs of health. They're an incredibly useless item normally since it's a single use level 1 anodyne that weighs more than more useful consumables, but it's a lot less broken than them since its heavy and has a use animation. Stock however many in your inventory that you feel like. Since they are fairly heavy you are encouraged not to get too many
>you can increase their healing speed by using the mod to tweak the value of the recuperation augment, I make it so that they can heal about 60% of my health bar and change the value whenever I change my health.
>now when you head out you have a very limited healing resource that you can't spam while the game is paused and it only heals grey health, meaning you must rest at inns or healing springs after quests
>lastly, delete the eternal ferrystone and buy them from the black market. If you have autism like me, which you probably do if you've been following any of this, you can reduce your money by cheating to make the price much more significant as it was before Dark Arisen.
And this might go without saying, but you should avoid any skills/augments that make the game less fun like spamming helm splitter with all the strength boosting augments. I also enjoy playing with really low stamina, on my fighter dragons maw (legion's bite) completely exhausts my stamina bar and I use it as a high risk high reward finisher. My sorcerer pawn also only has buffs and HUEG spells, the latter exhaust her stamina which makes them less common to see but feel more impactful when I do see them.