Best 4 Player Party

[Aerich]

If you have a monk in your party, dual-wielding is not the most efficient combat style for your other characters. The monk will generally take the role of meatshield, and it's better for other characters to attack in melee with 2-handed weapons, so that they are farther away and the enemies are less likely to switch their targets away from the monk.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with a pureclass Battleguard. A word of caution about druids - the shapeshifting has a lot of bugs in it, so don't rely on it. I've got the mod granting different shapes and more spells, but without it I wouldn't take a druid in every party.

I'm a little unclear on exactly what your objective is with this party, since the title is "Best 4 Player Party" but you aren't going to min-max and you seem to be re-thinking the party numbers.

Personally, I find spells fun. I also find that your garden-variety warrior can't stand up to a pounding very well without min-maxed stats or significant spellcaster support. I'm not too fond of pureclass fighters, since they don't have any "special" abilities and there aren't any useful skills for them to take.

The newest edition of your party is sub-optimal. Monks, even deep gnomes, need a tremendous amount of spell support to reach near-invulnerable status. Much of it needs to come from arcane spells, and you've only got one arcane caster (who is also filling the rogue role). I also don't think you need a fighter if you've already got a monk and a Battleguard.

I'd still take a sorceror. The ability to choose your spells in combat is a tremendous advantage, as long as you pick useful spells to learn.

[DoE]

lol, yeah I seen I wrote five members when the topic is about four characters. The reason I looked at five is that I asked about 4 characters levelling faster than 6 and thus receiving less experience, and read somewhere that ecl's help with this when you play with 4 characters. As no one really confirmed that here I thought maybe it wasn't true, so looked at five characters. Wow, my reasoning is just... like... way out there...

The ranger/cleric I decided on was from a party I had in IWD, and loved that character. The druids spells too I remember were a life saver: entangle + insect plague...

so how about:

Human Ranger 1 /Cleric
Dwarf Fighter
Human Druid
Drow or Tiefling? Rogue (1) / Wizard

Will that party level too fast and I end up not getting experience with certain parts of the game?

[kmonster]

The dynamic fighting XP calculation works the following way:

Your rounded down average party level is compared to the challenge rating of the monster you defeat. The lower your party level and the higher the monster CR level the more XP you get.
If your party is more than 7 levels higher than the monster's CR you don't get any XP at all.
This happens very often, even with a party of 6 you'll often get to a point where you don't get any fighting XP until you face harder monsters in the next chapter.
Therefore it doesn't matter if you have 4 or 6 characters, your rounded down average party level will always be the same at certain points in the game.
Many players are annoyed about getting no fighting XP in a party of 6, in a party of 4 this will happen even more often.

An example: At the end of the game your rounded down average party level will be 16, no matter what your party consists of.
You can have 4 level 16 humans or 1 level 16 tiefling and 5 level 17 humans or 4 level 15 deep gnomes, 1 level 17 aasimar and 1 level 18 dwarf for example.

At very early parts of the game a small party will level faster, but the dynamic XP calculation will nullify this advantage very soon in chapter 1.