[Update #56: Paladins and Wild Orlans]

I don't really remeber being able to be invulnerable in Bg2 even the meatshields you were using had to run for cover and switch bewen tanking sometimes, unless you outleveld them. This is something you would never be able to do if the AI was smart enough that every time you bring your wounded melee back in to the fight they would just focus on him again.

 

Or are you are talking about the fighter/wiz multicalss, which is a simple solution; don't add invunrability spells/armor to the game.

 

As for the monk situation you descibed, i doubt it will be like that because i doubt he will be able to 1-2 shot enemies and he would die pretty fast after that. The passive aura bonuses are most likely very minor since they affect the whole group not just specific person.

 

However I see nothing wrong with the tactic in Bg2 or IWD2 where you could send your rogue to backstab and send a fireball right at him (high reflex save) when the group started chasing him, because while it did some damage it didn't really kill that many and you had to get him to safety again.

 

If AI is going to just direct all the archers/gunners at your mages then at the start of every fight you will have to send your mage away and he will be uselses for the rest of the fight.

And as soon as your healers come to help the wounded they will be mowed down.

 

The best combat i find is when you can evenly spred the damage across your party, and for that you need to have some sort of control on who will take damage.

 

The problem I have with those tactics is that they are puzzle-oriented. The idea is that you canvas, plan your strategy and execute. If you fail, you try again, using the knowledge from you prior attempt to refine your tactics. The majority of the late game encounters in BG2 fit this model, you had to memorize spell sequences, plan your buff according to the monster you know will spawn. Sometimes you could play it by ear, but often that meant you'd only win if you got lucky on rolls.

 

I've always thought combat worked out better when the situation developed organically and couldn't be solved via brute force.

 

The near invulnerable character I was thinking about in BG2, is the thread's namesake, the Paladin. A high level Paladin in BG2 had a low enough AC that only a handful of monsters could hit it, depending on their subclass, they could have enough immunities to shrug off any debuff and many late game enemies had further penalties due to being "evil". 

[Update #56: Paladins and Wild Orlans]

I don't really find anything wrong with such AI. Some people call it cheesing but i call it tactics. You can easly make an AI smart enough that it always attacks your weakest fighters or mages and healers first, but then what's the point of having them in the pary at all if all you will do with them is run away.

If 5 melee group on 1 paladin he's going to go down pretty fast, or take so much damage that you will be too scared to even get him close for the rest of the fight, because they will turn on him as soon as he comes close again. I rather like the design where the AI has overpowering stats and you need to rely on tactics to get through the fight by making sure the members with highest defensees takes the blows first, and supporting them with magic at the back.

 

Call me silly, but "bait them with the invulnerable PC" stops being a tactic once you use it on the fifth group of enemy NPCs. Sure, it make sense when you are attacking wild dogs that are using strength of numbers as a strategy, but against equally leveled sentient  enemies it always smelled like an exploit, even if BG2 made it more or least mandatory to win.

 

If "run in and draw aggro with the monk, sit him inside the paladin's buffing aura while the enemy pummel him, and after the monk has powered up from the beating, deploy his nuke" wins 90% of battles, the devs will have to balance around it and we're back to BG2's reload fests if you didn't cheese all the battles.

[Update #56: Paladins and Wild Orlans]

I'm curious, will the AI be smart enough to have melee fighters pile on the party's Paladin? Seems like the Paladin is a high value target in the front line of combat, but historically, Infinity engine games have had issues with ensuring the that AI doesn't just fixate on a target that is invulnerable to the particular attack it's using or chasing around targets it can't hit while getting picked apart by ranged PCs.