[Question: Temple of Eothas]

On normal, you only have shadows, which are hard enough at level 2 with only 2 or 3 companions...

[Companions]

The companions offers tons of good dialogue options and add excellent commentary to the stories.

 

Their combat abilities are... lacking to say the least.

[What is "Bash?"]

It acts as a weapon in addition to its defensive stats.

 

Just like dual wielding.

 

I stopped using that shield because I want my tank to use his MH weapon to dmg.

[Soloing Pillars of Eternity (Minimal spoilers, please!)]

I think it will be hard to solo in the first playthrough, at least in the first 10 hours of playthrough, for a couple of reasons.

 

First, there are combat mechanics:

• There is a minor debuff called flanked that gives -10 deflection. It is a big deal when a couple spiders are beating on you and you are -10 to each.
• Then, there is disengagement penalty that gives enemy an auto hit/crit on you if you try to run after being 'engaged'. 
• You can't run away and zone to a different area to quit combat.
• A lot of the skills have a limited number of uses 'per rest'; resting either takes money (camping) or take time (run back to town), or both eventually. 
• When you are in a dungeon questline, there are no combat experience and you only get a lum of experience at the end of the quest. So, if you have to consume every charges/consumable to get though one type of encounter in a dungeon, you will probably need to rest/get back to town to resupply throughout the entire dungeon. 

Then, you need to have good knowledge of character builds, and how well the class is to face different encounters

• It just take good knowledge of all the skills to know what skills to take for a solo playthrough
• Most classes have specific roles to fill in combat. There is no class that is excel in both defense and offense. Any middle of the road build is hurt more by the mediocrity than helped by it. 
• There are variations in combat situations that render some aspect of combat impossible. For example, there are some encounters when the mobs just stand there and blast you with insane amount of ranged damages, and hell they are not going to move onto the traps.