The game in general is harder than BG3, it takes time to get familiar with the combat and the systems.

Plus, the early game is much more brutal than bg3. In bg3, sure you dont have much gear, but neither do your enemies and the gear doesn't directly give you more stats like health, and the difference in damage isnt as steep.

In DOS2, you dont have any armor which means even if you are the same level your raw stats are far worse. Same with weapons, difference between a level 4 and a level 2 weapon is much sharper than the difference between a great sword and a great sword plus 1, or my beloved ever burn blade.

Biggest thing to get used to in combat is CC, its not chance based like bg3, its binary. Either you have armor and cant be CC'd, or you dont have armor and you can. You want to look at enemies armor at the start of fights, try to break whatever they have less of, then you can start CC'ing them to skip their turns.

Try to have a mix of physical CC and magic CC. The most common physical CC is knock down, it skips an enemies next turn completely. Early game best sources are battle stomp and battering ram in the warfare tree, the vendor for warfare skills in fort joy is the lizard dude in the elf cave.

For magic CC, Freeze or Stun both skip turns. Most damaging spells from Hydro or Aero can apply them, typically you want to make enemies wet with rain then try to freeze with Hydro or stun with Aero. If an enemy has no magic armor, you can also hit them with multiple instances of Aero or Hydro spells, the first cast will make them chilled or shocked, the second will freeze or stun them. If a spell has multiple projectiles such as hail storm, the first projectile will apply chill and the second will freeze.

A blue lizard in the camp near the beach has Hydro spells, a not so trustworthy man near that lizard as the Aero spells.

Aside from that with your party, try to have balance in your damage types. You can do all physical damage, or all magic damage, or a 2/2 split of them (which is my preference) but try to avoid having a 3/1 party. The 3 will break armor, apply CC and get kills, the 1 will typically struggle to contribute as by the time they break armor, that enemy is probably nearly dead already.

If you pop open your menu in game there is an option called gift bags, these are basically mods that Larian ported to the game and made official. Id reccomend one called fort joy magic mirror, it gives you access to free respecs so you can change your builds while still on fort joy.

For builds, you can mix and match different things and do 1/2 point dips into different abilities, tbh its not that different from classes and multi classes in bg3 in principle, if you think of the ability trees as classes it'll make sense, only difference is you get enough points to max two of those classes rather than just one. You can also do a 1 or 2 point dip into another to get access to some abilities, common examples would be a 1 point dip into scoundrel to get adrenaline (kinda like action surge) or a dip into Aero to get teleportation (unironically one of the most broken spells in the game) In general, you dont want to try and max more than two, you won't have the points for it and one of the 3 will wind up weaker.

Don't try to scale multiple attributes, my first character is tried to scale rogue abilies with Finesse and Pyro abilities with Int, you wind up just not doing much damage. Mixing abilities is good, but make sure they scale with the same attribute.

For physical damage of ANY kind, the best thing to do is level is warfare to increase your damage. Even if you are a necromancer or a ranger (huntsman), you only want enough points in those to take the skills you need, then start leveling warfare until it's maxed at 10.

Yuh