Rhymfaxe

They are the same, only one is premade with a storyline (and terrible stats).

It is real time, in normal speed mode. If you play in fast mode, the durations will obviously seem shorter.

If you were able to lockpick the locked door across the corridor, you don't need to fight them. The wheel just lower the water so you can fight some blobs and find the key.

Third option will let you access a room further down in the labyrinth which has a couple of magic items, gloves and a sword as i recall.

Easy to test, just save and recruit two chanters from an inn. I have a suspicion that all buffs overwrite buffs of the same name.

Use one of your other characters to inflict conditions Backstab triggers for, and your rogue will wreck people. If played/specced correctly rogue is the highest single target dpser in the game.

Wiz, Fighter, Priest, Chanter have all been mentioned. You find the 5th companion, a ranger, in the middle of the crossroads south of your stronghold (east of the southern bridge), i forget what its called.

My 2h barb/aoe build (using quarterstaff for more carnage range, but any weapon with range increase ench works) is quite nice. The staff allows me to stand behind the fighter in a door opening and wreck the enemies he's tanking. My stats are something like 18/8/16/9/18/8, so she hits fast, hard, and everything. She is not tanky though, but the endurance regen skill usually saves her when she overextends and gets hit a lot.

It is normally adequate, and simplifies things, but it does mess up rogues a bit yeah. Can't think of any other issues than rogue backstabs though. Maybe stealth mage off to the side.

If you don't have at least two characters that can hold a few enemies in close combat and not die, you will struggle when you can't use chokepoints to your advantage as they will swarm your squishies in the back. With only Edêr i struggle with containing the enemies sometimes (on hard). Anything that isn't a high deflection tank dies too quickly, so my recommendation is having two of them. If you want to super min/max it's certainly possible that you want two fighters instead of paladins and such.

You are supposed to increase in endurance yes. Check your debuffs, you are exhausted and need rest when you leave the ruins.

The extra weapon set is not really that useful for a barb, you won't be using ranged, so two weapon sets are enough. A aoe/dps barb does not do well knocked down (which the costal aumaua get defence agaisnt if i recall correctly). So then the choice is clear from a mechanics perspective. Barbarians can use any armor, but I feel a dps barb's sweet spot is like scale/breastplate. You do need enough DR to stay alive on the front lines, but not too much so your dps gets too low.

The companions are built pretty badly yeah (too badly, ****ty stats don't make characters more interesting sorry Obsidian), and the character interactions are honestly not the end of the world as far as I've been able to see so far (lvl 5). I'm sticking with them though (on hard), but lack of tanky characters is a problem.