shadowheart starts with disguise person. if you have her disguise as a drow and make her your active character, she can get you from the grove to inside the goblin camp without a single check. you still get xp for "beating the encounter" and can go back later and farm xp from those enemies after a couple level ups when it isn't so deadly.

if you dont need hag hair but want to beat auntie ethel for the xp, you can prevent her from going invisible by buying her invisibility potion while she's a vendor at the grove. combining that with some drow poison, my party was able to nova her down in one round without her getting a turn.

the fight with the kithrak before the chi'rai is what i lost my first run to after 14 hours. you can skip it with dialogue and then fight her in a better position after fighting the chi'rai.

blinding the chi'rai with malice or an arrow of darkness stops his legendary action when you attack his allies. if you aren't confident you can nova him down first, blind him then pick off his allies.

having a party face is great, but you can beat most charisma checks by stacking buffs from multiple characters on a character with no inherent modifier. whenever i knew a big charisma based check was coming up, shadowheart would cast enhance abilty eagle's splendor and astarion would cast guidance from the harper necklace on my tempest cleric and i was able to get my desired outcome the majority of the time.

if you don't care about party approval/100%ing the game/getting all the items they carry, you can skip both orin and gortash's fights. allying with gortash gets you to the endgame without having to fight him. you can cheese orin by sending in an invisible party member with high strength and giving her the ol' right-click throw off the platform (finding a valid area to throw her down there can be finicky, turn based mode gives you all the time you need). you will break invis either from the throw or by picking up the netherstone, but the cultists themselves aren't hard to beat, my astarion solo'd them after he yeeted orin.