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Good work!

I think the chance to receive one without dying decreases so much that it's effectively 0% after a few of them. I saw someone talking about receiving 4 once, but that's the max I've ever seen. Would need more testing to be sure though, or a response from Brian himself.

Hey! a little bit late on the response, sorry haha

Yup, I agree with mortician being a good class to have as a mercenary:) you can also carry around corpses and drop them when you need them, as husks will decay after a few minutes.

About runes and spellcrafting... it all depends in what's your strategy for your run, in your case (3 spell-slot, caster class) I would go for:

1. (X/Y) Shield of Rejuvenation:  X and Y being the elements you want to focus on. Self-castable spells will always trigger their effects, so they are good to buff yourself before a battle or to heal after one. Also, the shield spell boost all of your attunements, which is good if you are looking to make the most out of your elemental effects, attunement also (maybe?) boost your elemental damage but I haven't tested that yet. The Rejuvenation lasts for about 6 turns with Average charm, probably increased with spell quality too
2. (X/Y) Curse/Field of Vulnerability: Curse if you prefer going for single target damage, Fields if you prefer AoE. The good thing about vulnerability is that apart from increasing physical damage taken, it also increases the duration of other debuffs.
3.  (X/Y) Barrage of Poison/Blinding: Barrage spells won't trigger elemental effects, but they will benefit from the bonus damage from curse and fields, and at higher spell quality the AoE is huuuge. The effect will be longer due to the vulnerability, Poison is good if you don't have another way to inflict Poison to counter healing enemies (i.e an Earth Staff), but you could change it to Bleeding for enemies who dash a lot. If you want to go for a more defensive effector, Blinding is one of the best for that.

It's advisable o diversify your spells' elements, just in case you find a strong enemy resistant to the attunement you are trying to go for, the arrows spell are also good for that, as you said.

In my experience,stat-buffing effector runes are stronger early in the game, when the bonus stats are pretty noticeable (probably even better than a single masterwork piece of equipment) , and they are amazing if you are going for high reputation with the Radiant Hand to get the traits that makes buffs better, they fall off later into the game when you reach Godlike in your needed stats, though they could be good to suplement your weaknesses. You are correct about stat-debuffs being a little situational, my advice here is figuring what type of enemies you are struggling against the most and then deciding if you want some stat debuff to counter them, keep in mind that High Resilience enemies will make your debuffs almost useless, so it's good to have vulnerability just to decrease a little more their thoughness.

Hey!
About your first point: I don't feel like it's always mandatory to play with mercs with frail builds, there's a few ways to counter enemies that want to close in on you. 
The bleeding effect makes it so that enemies take more damage if they move, so it's really good to cast on enemies that are about to dash, probably good to put it on a long range spell.
There's also the rune of forces, which pushes enemies away, the range is really small (like only 1 or 2 steps), but at higher spell quality the amount you push them is enough that they won't be able to reach you in a single dash action.
You could also try to play with traps, but I haven't experimented with those too much to give advice.

Oh, and a swiftshade with the shadowform trait is great at killing multiple enemies one by one. It's a huuuuge power trip, I really recommend you try it at some point!

Hello!
Apparently the mouse option for casting the spell is bugged right now. But if you type "/cast 3" in the command prompt it should work. Another thing to consider is that you can't copy innate abilities (like grasping earth from legendary  beasts). Hope this helps:)

In the new update cooked food seems to be the best way to heal while outdoors, it applies the "Rejuvenation" buff, which slowly regenerates health. You can increase buff duration by having a higher Charm score, making Delightful meals (the ones made by cooking flowers) heal more than other types of meals.

There's a class that doesn't get encounters while resting outside. For other classes if you don't want to risk getting ambushed you should be inside a building with a closed door before resting, if you have a bed and a source of warmth (braziers, for example), your resting will be much more efficient.

Other than those two, if you get lucky with runes you could infuse your weapon with water, the healing from water runes gets amplified by a certain Curio you can get from "Tool Boxes", and it maybe also scales from attunement, but I'm not sure. Or if you get a rune of rejuvenation, combine it with a self-cast spell to have easy healing everywhere you go, the same rule for charm that I wrote above applies here.

RIP monk

There's an update coming soon-ish, currently there's a group of people testing the new version. Ask in the discord server for more info!