I like it to have my party rolling close together and first. I had bad experience where a char late in the action bar was already dead till the turn came to her.
With rolling together you also can (theoretically at least) do awesome combos, like yesterday in my first time Raphael fight. Gale indeed succeeded one time to put R. to sleep (with an ok-ish crit from Jaheira -Paladin/Bard- as result), and I got bold and tried a nice two glyph combo on 4 grouped up cambions, of course all resisted sleep ...
I still think that 1 successful sleep and 2 following failures on R. (and then loss of concentration despite Sanctuary) was a waste of one of my two lvl 6 spells, but that's another topic.
I followed the advice and made Shadowheart 20 Wis and with the Alert feat. Because with Jaheira now in my party I have another initiative gimp to care for.
