Why is he so witty?
Also lol at lizard party.
You need 1 high wit char to always go first unless the game forces you to go 2nd with something like 45 ini enemy while your ini is at 25. Going first will cause the rotation to be me-enemy-me and with my 2nd ranger having the 2nd highest ini, I will get to get to use huntsman ranged attack twice and instantly gip an enemy or, if I spread out my shots, knock down half of the enemy team before they get to act and instantly win the battle on turn 1.
And lizard party best party. I'm gimping myself so heavily with having Fane and Ifan using shapeshift mask at all time. So many good hats untouched and this will hurt me even more when they start giving 4-5 warfare or something.
The excuse you're giving is essentially that the game was poorly balanced for anything after Act 1. This unfortunately is the natural result of a game so large that it's not possible to do a complete playthrough with the same characters before the next build comes down the pipe forcing a restart. Because no one takes one set of characters through the game, they have no idea about an ACTUAL player's equipment situation. It was clearly a mistake for Larian to try to release a Tactician mode on Day 1.
The bottom line is that Larian set their expectations for a Tactician mode which was similar to the D:OS 1 mode. That stretch goal wasn't promoted as "Pledge a little higher, and get the exact same stat bloat that other RPG's throw in and call it a day!" Even if you enjoy the challenge, that cannot be denied.
The only real mode that players should never touch on release is the 1-save-file iron man mode.
Tactician is fine because even with no knowledge of what you will run into, as long as the players keep their gears updated and try to follow a hidden set of path the game set for them that can be found by looking at the levels of the animals in the area, they should be able to do it.
I blamed the stat bloat too when I got stomped at level 1 to 3. Now that I realize how the game works and how they want to guide the players, tactician mode is fun again. The mirror is always there if I want a free reset too so the players are always free to retry and experiment with something new. No longer do I feel like I'm losing a fight because they have bloated stat. Instead, most of the time, if I'm losing a fight, I really did something wrong or chose a wrong approach.
atm, as long as you have the right gears, any build will work as long as it's not weird like "Fire and Ice master wizard" even in tactician.
And by default, classic mode should have been the go-to if they don't have any idea what the game will contain due to lack of wiki pages for all the quests and loots location. Tactician mode is a choice here and I'm sure that even without the stat bloats, if people go into fight with underleveled gear, they will still complain about that 2.7k armor which is the amount they will meet on classic instead of the 4k ones.