one big simple tip i can give you: Respec shadowheart. literally just pick a different type of priest. maybe knock her strength down a little. i like life domain, but plenty of the others are good too.
otherwise, just try to play with the environment more. be ok with not hitting the enemy sometimes. hide around corners and behind doors, shoot from high shadows, use the area of effects as well as you can. sometimes you can cheese the hell out of fights in ways the game encourage.
all that said, paladin starts week, shadowheart’s default loadout just IS week, rogue starts week, and with wizard you gotta find the spells that work for you. some of them are bad and the class starts with so few spell slots…
try getting the staff from the waukeen’s rest quest reward, the amulet of magic missile from blurg and like a couple other “lightning charge” items and give all that to gale and start spamming “magic missile” you’ll feel strong.
On the topic of utilizing Gale (or Wyll): The spell Cloud of Daggers is pretty useful early on with a bit of positioning. It won’t get you singlehandedly through every fight, but you can make lots of fights easier by casting that spell in a choke point and forcing enemies to walk into it to get you.
Bonus points if you can upcast, more bonus if you position your paladin or cleric on the other side of the cloud to keep enemies in it or push them back in once they’re through it. Ranged enemies will move into it if they can’t see their targets, so hide your party arong corners to lure them in.
If you have gale and wyll, you can get two clouds going.
This is a bit off topic because you don’t use her. But there’s a javelin build with karlach that carried me from early act 1 a good ways through act 3. Theoretically should work on any strength character, but best with a barbarian:
Subclass her into the frenzy barbarian. Take tavern brawler as your feat. Find the ring of flinging from the merchant in the Grove.
The javelin base damage is 1d6 + str damage, ring of flinging adds 1d4, and tavern brawler adds your strength again to the attack roll and damage roll. Plus the feat gives +1 str to bump karlach up to 18(+4 modifier).
Then, frenzy allows you to throw a second (and later third) javelin with your bonus action.
Each hit tends to have 95% chance, has considerable range, and reliably puts out about 15/hit with the potential to hit like 28 Twice per turn.
The frenzy hit also has a good chance to knock your target prone for that extra salt.
Then you can buy the pike of returning from the goblin merchant (must be before you agro them) to automatically get it back after you throw it so you don’t need a ton of javelins. And you can also collect the gloves of uninhibited kushido from the myconid colony to bump the damage up even more.
Casting enlarge on her helps with that damage output, as well as an elixer of the Hill giant, or anything that bumps str up more.
I mean depends on what you mean by playing “wrong”. If you mean non-optimal, then of course, because almost no one is. If you survive each encounter with at least one alive, then you’re not going game over though, and it’s trivial to resurrect the rest of your characters, just need some money. Perfectly fine way to play the game.
If you want some general tips on how to play fights better:
Always always always focus the target that has the worst damage/survivability ratio first, and only that. Enemy wizards. Or ranged enemies. Or small, fast critters. Each enemy does its full damage no matter what its hp is. 10 half-HP enemies are much worse for you than 5 full-HP ones and 5 dead ones. That said, still use your AOE spells with your wizards etc, but then immediately target only one of those damaged ones to go down first.
Each combat participant has a threat radius around it, which is the radius in which they can deal damage to something. If the threat radius of 4 enemies overlaps on one of your characters, that character is in big trouble. But in turn, if the threat radius of 4 of your characters overlaps on one enemy that enemy is in huge trouble. So, always create situations in which all your characters can do damage to an enemy, but they can’t do the same to you. For example, positioning your ranged characters on a cliff could make them immune to a bunch of melee enemies and deliberately not running your melees in, waiting for the enenies to come to you and using (sub-optimal compared to melee) range attacks on your melees until then.
Use healing word and throwing of potions to pick up downed characters. Don’t heal before they go down, it’s mostly not worth it. If your bonus action is not used, keep drinking healing potions with it in hard fights. If you can, spread around the damage on your characters, like I just said, 4 half-HP characters are damage-wise exactly as strong as 4 full-HP ones, but 2 full-HP and 2 downed ones are much much worse.
Use your long rest abilities, like spell slots, liberally. There’s enough resources laying around to rest often.
I just stacked boxes to jump over the wall of priestess gut’s room to get all the powder and oil barrels and everyone carries 3 or 4 depending on what their capacity is, and if I can’t clear a battle normally I reload to the save before and sneak barrels strategically around and blow them all up from a distance.
As such I don’t feel like there is a right or wrong way. Next play through I’m going to try not to do this but I know I’m inevitably going to try to come up with some really dumb cheese tactics.
Goblin camp you can just let gut drug you and dialogue then done. The drow what’s her name you can sell out the Grove and then shoot the bridge down as she’s leaving. The other guy you can void ball him into the pit next to his throne after the cutscene that makes him sit and invis or tp away with a scroll, or barrel bomb the whole room so no witnesses are left.
Try to use the environment. Eg for the church, there is an oil barrel that can cause a lot of damage. For gnolls try to use the high ground and you can turn the boss on the others. Sometimes it’s best just to attack first, Asterion can usually kill an enemy in the first round.
The game starts out hard and then gets easier as you get more tools, but there’s a low-level build that helps you even the odds until your other characters catch up…
Bring Karlach and have her throw things. She gets two attacks a turn at level 3 with the Berserker subclass and Enraged Throw (most other classes have to wait until at least level 5 for a second attack), an enormous boost to her damage and accuracy from Tavern Brawler at level 4, and then a third attack at level 5. Potions of Haste or Elixirs of Bloodlust give her even more attacks, and certain magic items boost throw damage significantly. You can buy a reusable throwing spear for her in the goblin camp, but even before that you will have lots of javelins, axes, and daggers to throw. You just need to pick them all back up after the fight.
(Some people say that throw barbarians make the game boring, but Karlach can pick up and throw small characters like goblins. This never gets old. Imagine that Karlach is about to win the NBA championship for you with a three-pointer, the basketball is a goblin, and the basket is another goblin.)
Nah, sounds pretty close to how I did on my first playtrough as well. All of those are among the hardest fights early on. In my experience it gets a little easier as you level up, but there are still a lot of fights that can absolutely wreck you if you’re not careful or not using all the tools you have available.
A few things that helped me:
pick and choose fights. Many of the harder fights you can skip and come back later
use line of sight (and elevation!) to your advantange. Enemies can’t use ranged attacks on you if they can’t see you, and if you’re above them they have penalty to hit and you get advantage!
use ground effects to create choke points/limit enemy movement. You have grease spell/bottles available early and you get a lot stronger stuff as you progress
use environmental effects when they’re available. There’s a ton of explosive barrels and other things to trigger that can be very helpful
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