Yeah I'd like to try bard too. I chose two "pure fighters" (a paladin and a fighter) so that I have two main tanks, behind which others can hide if needed. But the druid/fighter and even the cleric became also quite competent melee fighters, good backups, so they could quite often also be in the front line.

For some reason I always like to think that cleric is supposed to be merely a healer, ie. useless and fragile in hand-to-hand combat (even more so than mages), but apparently in AD&D games they are some kind of hammer-wielding killing machines who just happen to be good healers too. The cleric was probably my third-best melee fighter, gimped by her weapon restrictions.

And yeah, thief, at least multiclassed, is quite important. I wanted her to be useful also outside of finding and disarming traps, so mage/thief for me.

Something that is still a bit unclear to me is how charisma, intelligence and/or wisdom affect your dialog options with NPCs. I think in IWD some dialog options are available only with e.g. high wisdom, while some with high intelligence? And does charisma affect them too? Mainly like if you can talk yourself out of something (without fighting), convince someone to do something, or things like that. Like, only if your negotiator has high enough wisdom, you will remember to tell certain NPC to leave all his belongings to you, before he leaves the scene for good. Then you get some useful items from him, yay.