Consider the fact that Bg3 doesn’t do group stealth checks. If the party tries to sneak around some guards, because sneaking outside cone of vision isn’t an auto success, every one rolls for stealth individually. That includes the plate-wearing, disadvantage-rolling paladin. The party’s stealth effectively becomes the stealth of the least dextrous, which doesn’t feel great.
I hear you. On the other hand, the party's quiet tiptoeing behind a guard's back coming to a sudden halt as the clanking of the clunky paladin's armour alerts everyone within a mile is very much a DnD moment. Not being able to sneak your entire party anywhere you want is the price you pay for having a heavily armoured front line, and having no sturdy front line is the price you pay for the ability to consistently open fights with a surprise round. I believe that's fair.
So then maybe Larian adds group stealth checks? But how does the game know what a group is? Do we have to fiddle with the portraits? In any case, these questions and more would need answering.
If a single roll fails, then one could just keep their heavily armored 8-dex paladin ~30 feet behind, outside of the 360 degree enemy perception range. This is how it's often done in tabletop; the stealthy characters stealth a bit ahead (30-60 ft are the "standard" distances imo, but it'd be reasonable to shorten that to 20-30 ft for BG3 maps). This would work with enemies having either a single perception ring, or a smaller perception ring and a farther "sight" cone. Essentially you'd risk being detected with your tank a turn away for the chance of getting a surprise round.
A perception ring to represent hearing/smell combined with a longer sight cone is a great suggestion. There's no need to know who belongs to what group; anyone who enters a perception ring rolls stealth. If they move into the vision cone or the cone moves over them, they roll again. Light level and obscurity are already implemented, they just need to be meaningfully used.
Ideally there would be some increments based on proximity as well, e.g. a creature gains a bonus to Perception DC against creatures sneaking very close to them and a penalty against distant ones. Vision cones could then be made much larger, as they should be. This would put a stop to the githyanki patrol being completely oblivious to you climbing down a ladder right behind their backs and other immersion breaking absurdities that now occur at every step of the game if you use stealth at all. Sadly that would be far less trivial to implement and properly test, especially this late in development.
