Archer - Warrior - Dual thief - Support Mage is still my go-to set up for easygameasylife.
Because of how the armor/magicshield system work, specing into a balance hybrid makes it too hard to deal actual damage as you need to break through the inflated value to be useful in the first place and with the extra cost on the current skill books, it's almost impossible to get all the useful spell learnt early without spending some time crafting and using the hourly store reset to get some gold with a good barter character (usually the prince) with level 5+ thievery.
I have no trouble playing with no shield since the AI, although much better, is still predictable and the only way to really lose if when you somehow get 3-4 man CC'd at once but with a good initiative (wit build) and some good damage on the archer and thief, you can pretty much kill all the CC chars before they even get to act.
