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.
I guess the reason why I bring up the "cheese" in this thread is because I think the CC system is only broken if the AI is perfected. It's strange, actually, I tried using that barrel tactic against the dogs by Kniles, and one of the dogs actually attacked one of the barrels to clear the doorway. Unless the dog accidentally hit the barrel trying to aim its crossbow at me, then I think they have already tried to address this issue, but I am not certain, since Bishop Alexandar fell for it in the final battle.
I really want to get at the core concepts here as concisely as possible, this is an attempt:
(1) Is using the flee mechanic cheese? Is using tactical retreat or cloak and dagger or invisibility/sneak cheese?
If not, given any group of enemies, if I can isolate a 1v1 and get a kill without getting CCd, there exist multiple viable builds that can consistently achieve victory without cheesing (so far from personal experience I know exactly 2, but both require having points in Thievery and 1 point into Scoundrel).
(2) If it is possible to solo Act 1 without cheesing, then not soloing Act 1 is trivial.
If not, then your non-solo build/tactics need modification.
(3) In my opinion, if the answer to (1) is no and (2) applies, then CC system doesn't need to change. I honestly don't feeeeeeel like I "cheesed" too horribly. It was actually enjoyable to find the exact order of which enemy to aggro, from which position, etc. It's not like you just go in and win the battle the first time. It's still a challenge.
Right now I am going to make a full mage build without putting points into thievery or scoundrel. If I can solo Act 1 with that build, I honestly don't think the CC system is broken. It's just very chess-like. If you let your guard down thinking you can steamroll a group of enemies instead of re-positioning and reinforcing your defense to avoid getting CC chained, you're basically allowing yourself to be check-mated. In chess it doesn't matter if you have more pieces or if all your pieces are surrounding the enemy king when you leave yourself exposed to a major, game-ending, vulnerability.
