May I suggest since you're shooting unguided and are saying that you have problems with deformed stars, rather than dropping back the ISO, drop back the shutterspeed. Leave the ISO up.
You want to get nice round stars consistently and not blow out the centre of the nebula. Then do LOTS of subs and stack them in deep sky stacker. I used this setup to take shots of darker nebula than the Orion one with great success before I bought an autoguider. :-)
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