Sneaking is op because you can start a battle with a sneak attack from Astarion and then the combat tracker is just Astarion and the enemies that saw him, or maybe only the little pillar of light that shows up.
Once Astarion gets locked into the combat tracker you can still maneuver everyone else around the enemies sight lines and get a few more alpha strikes in outside of the combat tracker. My paladin – in full plate – can walk right up to an enemy that’s frozen in the combat tracker as long as he doesn’t walk into the sight cone.
I beat dror, m, and gut in the goblin camp all without any of them taking any turns because I was able to alpha strike them into the dirt by just starting combat with the whole party sneaking, and then walking them right up outside of the combat tracker.
Is there a party that can really exploit this? Ranger, wolf barb, shadowharts +10 party sneak, and an assassin rogue? Just alpha strike everything.
It’s not really broken. Your party members are completely separate and distinct characters that can do whatever they want from a role playing perspective, including splitting up - arbitrarily adding everyone into initiative even if the enemies can’t see the other PC’s would feel less realistic and more videogamey. I’m saying this as someone who plays tabletop dnd and values the flexibility and near limitless options the game can accommodate. This is also a weird situation cuz many tabletop players have very different homebrew rules about how combat is initiated. Some DM’s allow people to opt into combat when someone else initiates, some DM’s decide who is in an encounter by distance, some force everyone into initiative when one party member initiates - there’s a lot of permutations and I think Larian did the right thing here cuz if you don’t like it and think it’s broken you can very easily not use stealth and line of sight to nuke your enemies. This isn’t a competitive game after all. I for one appreciate the tabletop spirit carrying over to BG3 instead of being unnecessarily restrictive.