Question: do you go after the stronger member of a group of enemies first, to make him stop punishing you early on, or do you kill all the weak ones that can fall fast, so you'll get less damage faster? I usually paralyze the alphas etc. and slaughter the rest, then move on to him, but I've had some problems with the leader coming back in the middle of the fight and doing MASSIVE damage when I'm already low on health/mana. Any ideas?
I'm also going to replace my dog, I think. He's good, but he doesn't have any skills to use, and that leaves him at a disadvantage. I think I'll get a rouge along, to pick locks etc, so far I've been able to just switch the party around when I need lockpick, and then switch back again, but I'm guessing that higher level chests requires higher level rouges.
The following is for hard and nightmare playthroughs, on easy or normal this level of strategy is completely unnecessary:
Ccing (crowd controlling - a MMORPGism) the strong and killing the weak is usually but not always the way to go. For instance, if there are 8 melee attackers, one yellow and 7 white, it usually makes sense to stick a forcefield on the yellow and wipe out the whites with aoe spells and attacks after taunting them onto your tank. This assumes you are playing on hard or nightmare -- on normal or easy, the strats shouldn't matter. On the other hand, if there are 10 guys, 3 melee, 5 archers and 2 casters, the best strat will be to aggro the mobs with your tank while the rest of your party is held in another room, retreat your tank to that room and immediately cast earthquake and/or grease plus an aoe over time spell like lightning storm into the room with the mobs covering the entrance to the room your party is in. The melee dudes will get owned as they move through the aoe and keep falling over, and if there is, for instance, a yellow caster, you can focus interrupts on him as soon as he is in the kill zone. Fist of stone is excellent as a ranged caster interrupt. More often than not you will find that the archers stay put while the casters and melee wander into the kill zone and get destroyed. This strat, incidentally, trivializes about 50% of the fights in the game on hard and nightmare.
The key to not getting owned by the yellow/orange dude when he gets out of cc is very simply to make sure that the tank has aggro, and that you have at least one mage healing the tank + poultices available. To guarantee tank aggro, make sure that your tank gets taunt and threaten as soon as possible, and that your melee damage dealers have disengage or feign death. If your ranged picks up aggro off the tank either cc (mage's seal of repulsion spell is particularly good for melee aggro) or kite to the tank. And makes sure that the tank always has enough stamina for an emergency taunt.
Boss fights need to be dealt with on a case by case basis, however. Most of the boss fights are designed to neutralize the retreat + kill zone strategy (Revenants will use group pull to mess you up, however there are counterexamples, for instance this is pretty much the only way to do the first optional Ser Cauthrien fight). Because cc will often not work on bosses or be limited to a few seconds (force field is one of the few that
will generally work, seal: paralyze will sometimes work for limited time, fist of stone and knockback based attacks will sometimes work although not against bosses that are large, e.g. dragons, etc.) the correct strategy is almost always to first make sure that the boss is on the tank, then kill all the little guys one by one, then finish the boss. An obvious exception is for those fights where the fight ends as soon as the boss is dead and the boss has relatively few hit points (e.g.
not the broodmother). In those situations it often makes sense to just blow up the boss, even if it means losing a few party members in the process.
The dog and Shale both appear excellent when you first get them, but are definitely sub-par as you approach endgame on hard and nightmare. Simply put, their limited equipment slots make them scale poorly to the higher levels. For instance, assuming you are comparing Shale or the dog against Alistair for tanking, once Alistair gets Shield Wall and the fourth point talent eliminating knock down plus the 90 gold ring for tanking, he will outclass both by a fair margin. Don't worry about who you are you using in the group though, because the characters that you are not using will never fall more than one level behind.
If the only thing you are using a rogue for is lock-picking then know that in something like 99% of areas, it is possible to clear without a rogue, than return with a rogue to open all the chests and doors you left unopened. At no point in the game does progress require a rogue, and with a little strategy, the traps can be more or less bypassed.
