Its not so much that its "death", though Gale in particular turns into a bomb and kills your dog when hes TPed to camp. its that someone being dead means you are a 3 man party and thats a huge reduction. Not gonna lie, 200 hours into the game now and can beat everything pretty easily, but its the fact that first playthroughs you kind of just follow the road. Go rescue Halsin, he is in the goblin camp. Cue fight. Or get let in by goblin girl because you think "that sounds hard". Rescue Halsin, cue fight out of it. If you save the grove, get kagha redeemed, lie to Minthara, and THEN go to Halsin, you can just walk out and never fight them and Halsin just meets you at the grove after you fight off the attack as all the commanders are with Minthara. So there are bypasses and all sorts of elevation, shadow, fog, grease, environment, sneak, so many things for sure. This is more directed at your first time player's perspective as that isnt terribly far into the number of hours you will have played by then and it has a bit of a shock associated with it going in as a relatively inexperienced player.
Yes, dropping to 3 or less characters is a huge disadvantage. That's why you need to aid downed characters fast, and get them out of danger asap. There are lots of tools to do that. I think the hardest fight in EA is Bulette (IMO). That guy has a massive AOE range and can KO characters 2+ at a time. Even so, if you can have at least one character keeping pressure on (for me, Lae'zel), and the others reviving each other, you'll win a hard fought battle, and that's very satisfying. I think a close second was the Druegar ambush, because that seriously caught me where I was in an awful position. Bulette doesn't have "good positioning" so that's why it's the "hardest."
Sure, if you know exactly what to do with the goblin camp, it's very easy. But that wasn't even really my point either. All of my suggestions did not require optimal decision making. Simply better decision making than "the worst possible choice." The game absolutely should punish you for making bad choices (e.g., marching in the front door looking for a fight surrounded by numerous goblin archers all with advantage on you). Just start your attack from on top of one of the walls and it's many times easier.
