Did you look beyond the river (north of the blighted village, I think) where there are the gnolls and the tollhouse? I always made the gnolls at the end of lvl 3 in the EA and was lvl 4 before the tollhouse (Karlach quest). In the release it's seemingly even easier to level, I was lvl 4 even before doing the gnolls, the first goblin camp, the second goblin camp at the temple, the bosses in the temple, the apothecary dungeon, the spiders and before all the Auntie Ethel stuff. You can get to lvl 5 before the underdark, never achieved that in the EA.
To the Gith fight, I absolutely have no interest to solve it peacefully, because I like the Gith armor (only pantless armor in the game so far, I'm still in Grymforge). BTW it was so easy to kill the Gith with my lvl 5 party that I changed to hard mode since then.
