Gyeff

You can get Hold the line passive talent in the defense section, this gives +1 engagement. Some weapons also give +1 engagement. So with the weapon and the passive you can get 3 engagements total. You will also get more companions as you progress so you can choose to keep Eder out of the party if you want. If Eder already had the Defender modal ability when you recruited him, thats a wasted talent point if you want to use him as a pure DPS. It is possible to recruit Eder before he gets that ability though (If you want to restart).To do this you have to do the following: After the events in Cilant Lis make a bee-line through Valewood straight to Gilded Vale without doing any of the side missions/killing too many mobs in Valewood. If you reach Gilded vale without getting too much exp in Valewood you will be able to recruit Eder and Aloth while they are still lvl 2. Eder will not have Defender at this point. At this point you can return to Valewood to do anything you want to there.

I know this. I'm just saying min/maxing is part of the game. You can choose to not do it if you prefer.

For which quest(s) should I switch in my companion to make sure I do not lose the quest/quest progression. I haven't found any guides online for this.

Have you considered that maybe it is intended for the players to min/max. For god's sake it even says on the hard mode tooltip: "Survival requires optimization of stats". Your suggestion would not eliminate min/maxing at all. Infact Fighters would be built exactly the same way they are built now. For your information you never want to minimize Might on Fighter Tanks because Combat Recovery's healing scales with Might. So with your suggested change Tanks would still build no Dex and no Int, only difference would be they would get their max might disengagement attacks constantly even though they have negative attack speed.

I want to play the game with a custom party and keep my companions in the inn/stronghold and then later do their quests near the end of the game. Is this possible to do, or do I have to have them in my main party during certain story segments and quests?

Okay, since nobody responded I tested it myself. HoTs do infact heal for less than what the tooltip says if the duration is lower than the base duration. I'm guessing the Damage/Heal value listed in the tooltip are based on the base duration. I can confirm that if you have lower duration than the base duration HoTs will heal for less. Based on this I can deduce that if you have higher duration than the base, HoTs will heal for more than the listed tooltip value.

You can build minimum Might and minimum Intelligence and gain the same effect out of Chants (discounting AoE radius). Can someone confirm or deny that this is bug? Is it working as intended? This information is crucial for people planning Chanter builds.

Why is your transcendent suffering showing +11.1 Unarmed Damage, Isn't it supposed to be +8? How did you make the damage go up? As far as I know it doesn't scale with might, it doesn't in my game anyway.

So having higher intelligence values (and therefore higher duration) heals more endurance than what is listed in the description? Can someone confirm?

I honestly don't know. It might be a possibility that the fire damage calculated from the base 13 goes through the target's Fire DR, but it's hidden?

Might's damage boost is not affecting the chanter's chants, specifically for the following chants: -Aefyllath Ues Mith Fyr -The Dragon Thrashed, The Dragon Wailed The weird part is that the tooltip during level up lies. In the character level up screen the damage and duration values show the correctly modified values thanks to might and intelligence, but after level up when I right click the abilities they show the default values. In testing I've found that The Dragon Thrashed, The Dragon Wailed in particular does the default damage of 40,40 (I have +30% Damage from might and Character level up screen correctly showed 52,52 as the modified damage value, the level up screen also showed the correctly modified duration value thanks to my intelligence). So, even if the chants are not meant to be modified by int and might (working as intended), there is tooltip bug specifically in the level up screen. Secondarily, if it is infact working as intended, nowhere does it teach that chants have this strange behavior.

I haven't tested it. But, I think your problem is that you are not properly losing engagement on your ranged characters. There are some skills in the game that specifically say: "cancels Engagement when it effect", the Rogue's Coordinated Positioning ability is one example, there are others. I've read that Monk's Rooting Pain ability also causes the monk to lose engagement and the enemies have to re-engage when they the interrupt has finished. I think (not sure) any CC's like prone, stun etc and any knockback abilities also make you lose engagement.

This is the best! Wish pale elfes could get black hair though