Endless circular arguing does nothing for the discussion and is just fucking exhausting to read. And I'm about 90% sure you both have had this exact argument six months ago.
So I'm going to quote someone else's post
Most of these enemies aren't particularly "high-level" creatures in PnP. Regular Drow are CR 1/4. Phase Spiders, and Minotaurs, are CR 3. Duergar are CR 1. Bulettes are CR 5. It's totally expected for a party of 4 4th level PCs to fight any of these creatures, especially with full resources. In fact, a lot of these creatures would get crushed by a party of 4 PCs if they were alone, which is why there's multiple of them so that there's some challenge. The two minotaurs encounter would be considered a medium difficulty encounter in tabletop for a party of 4 5th level characters.
The issue most PnP players have with these creatures in BG3 is actually that they have a bunch of new abilities that don't necessarily relate to their tabletop counterparts. Phase spiders, for example, have slightly less HP than PnP (28 vs 32) but can now teleport and make ranged attacks via their new spit ability, which actually makes them a bit stronger than their PnP counterparts. However the problem people have with them is that their ethereal jaunt ability was turned into a teleport when that's not really what it did in PnP..
Thank You for saying it. (Although 2 bulettes against 4 level 5 characters is still a deadly encounter, and if you are unlucky enough to attract the attention of the minos while fighting the bulettes, then woe, tpk be upon ye.)
Trying to achieve a satisfactory balance is futile, when the creatures in question have been given abilities beyond the scope of their pnp versions. This fundamentally changes the way they work, and affects the balance of encounters because their CR levels have not been adjusted for their new abilities. What was a medium encounter becomes an encounter with a difficulty ranging from hard to cheese-or-die.
And there are more than a couple of cheese-or-die encounters in the EA already. It possible that reduced/increased difficulty levels on launch will mitigate this, but we can only give feedback on what we have now, not what we might have in the future.
