I feel a separate ‘cheese thread’ wouldn’t hurt. What have you done to fool the AI so completely it hasn’t a chance? It would be impressive to see it react plausibly to the kind of slyness only a person is capable of, but it’s possibly asking for too much in all cases. The prison-of-barrels/wall-of-barrels situation should be addressed though, as it's a common and obvious exploit.

I don’t remember a party-based experience being as trivial as suggested, however. I haven’t played the game with the new AI, but the impression I’m getting is that it’s cleverer than it needs to be, rather the other way around...

Either way, ‘man-made cheese’, for lack of a better definition, is a complex and distracting topic, with multiple layers. CC is the big remaining issue, in my opinion, as it’s intended to be a core tactic, and therefore finely tuned and balanced. If it was resolved with some imagination, I could live with the other cheese tactics mentioned. If anything, CC is a cheesier tactic than any of the contrivances with barrels etc.

Even if there were just more ways to counter it. Elemental-based counters, as I’m all for developing the elemental feature over others. Maybe certain CC is negated completely on ‘opposing’ surfaces or by ‘opposing’ elemental spells. Even something physical like a knockdown should have a counter (I’m set on fire, so it ‘wakes me back up’, or whatever). I realise there are specific skills geared towards countering certain types of CC already, but they're too specialist - it should be possible to counter/nullify CC with an imaginative approach as well, as that's far more satisfying.