Do you have karmic dice on? On the lowest difficulty with karmic dice the enemies tend to hit and crit more often since they get the same +hit you do. Turning that setting off will make your rolls more random which means you can have good and bad streaks but the enemies are less likely to crit you every other hit.

Those three fights are the "big ones" in act 1, probably as hard as the goblin camp, what level were you when you did them?

The easiest difficulty make combat a faceroll (which is a great way to experience the story, if that's your primary goal); balanced makes you care about what level you are for the encounter, positioning, and your party make-up; Honour makes you think about terrain, party make-up, item use, damage types, and resource management.

Your ranged characters shouldn't be close enough together that they can be hit with an AoE, and ideally, they are somewhere that gives advantage.

Hey mate.
Getting wrecked is no shame at all.
I got absolutely wrecked by the bandits in the ruis too. Then I reloaded, discovered what use an oil keg can be, and won the fight.
Same with the Goblin camp, or the (second) attack on the Grove (which was far easier after moving some objects)
It's incredible how much easier a fight turns out if you contemplate for half a minute and the restart.
On the other side I decided to not reload, after one of the characters got killed in camp, because opposite to losing a fight, It was my decision to watch the outcome - which was worse.

PS: I am doing it the other way than you did. I started in August alone in balanced mode, and are halfway through act2 by now. And started a co-op playthorugh together with my wife in easy mode two weeks ago.

How did you enter the church? You can sneak in the right hand side and avoid two of the fights. You only have to fight the skeletons (which you can disarm).

Also you can talk your way out of the first fight at the church. Or you can kill half the guys there by shooting the giant block hanging over their heads.

Don’t be scared of combat, just use quicksave liberally until you feel more confident. There is almost always a shortcut or easy way out of combat in BG3. My current run i’m trying to solo tactician so you gotta skip as much as you can. I’m at several hundred hours in the game so if you have more specific questions don’t hesitate to ask.

I mean depends on what you mean by playing "wrong". If you mean non-optimal, then of course, because almost no one is. If you survive each encounter with at least one alive, then you're not going game over though, and it's trivial to resurrect the rest of your characters, just need some money. Perfectly fine way to play the game.

If you want some general tips on how to play fights better:

• Always always always focus the target that has the worst damage/survivability ratio first, and only that. Enemy wizards. Or ranged enemies. Or small, fast critters. Each enemy does its full damage no matter what its hp is. 10 half-HP enemies are much worse for you than 5 full-HP ones and 5 dead ones. That said, still use your AOE spells with your wizards etc, but then immediately target only one of those damaged ones to go down first.
• Each combat participant has a threat radius around it, which is the radius in which they can deal damage to something. If the threat radius of 4 enemies overlaps on one of your characters, that character is in big trouble. But in turn, if the threat radius of 4 of your characters overlaps on one enemy that enemy is in huge trouble. So, always create situations in which all your characters can do damage to an enemy, but they can't do the same to you. For example, positioning your ranged characters on a cliff could make them immune to a bunch of melee enemies and deliberately not running your melees in, waiting for the enenies to come to you and using (sub-optimal compared to melee) range attacks on your melees until then.
• Use healing word and throwing of potions to pick up downed characters. Don't heal before they go down, it's mostly not worth it. If your bonus action is not used, keep drinking healing potions with it in hard fights. If you can, spread around the damage on your characters, like I just said, 4 half-HP characters are damage-wise exactly as strong as 4 full-HP ones, but 2 full-HP and 2 downed ones are much much worse.
• Use your long rest abilities, like spell slots, liberally. There's enough resources laying around to rest often.

Respec shadowheart into a war or tempest cleric, trickery is without a doubt the worst subclass in the whole game.

Remember that gale grants allies immunity to his evocation spells, so don't worry about AOE with those

one big simple tip i can give you: Respec shadowheart. literally just pick a different type of priest. maybe knock her strength down a little. i like life domain, but plenty of the others are good too.

otherwise, just try to play with the environment more. be ok with not hitting the enemy sometimes. hide around corners and behind doors, shoot from high shadows, use the area of effects as well as you can. sometimes you can cheese the hell out of fights in ways the game encourage.

all that said, paladin starts week, shadowheart's default loadout just IS week, rogue starts week, and with wizard you gotta find the spells that work for you. some of them are bad and the class starts with so few spell slots...

try getting the staff from the waukeen's rest quest reward, the amulet of magic missile from blurg and like a couple other "lightning charge" items and give all that to gale and start spamming "magic missile" you'll feel strong.

Nah, sounds pretty close to how I did on my first playtrough as well. All of those are among the hardest fights early on. In my experience it gets a little easier as you level up, but there are still a lot of fights that can absolutely wreck you if you're not careful or not using all the tools you have available.

A few things that helped me:

• pick and choose fights. Many of the harder fights you can skip and come back later
• use line of sight (and elevation!) to your advantange. Enemies can't use ranged attacks on you if they can't see you, and if you're above them they have penalty to hit and you get advantage!
• use ground effects to create choke points/limit enemy movement. You have grease spell/bottles available early and you get a lot stronger stuff as you progress
• use environmental effects when they're available. There's a ton of explosive barrels and other things to trigger that can be very helpful

Take a look at some guides for your character types. You might be doing a bit more role playing and not enough combat specing. I mean not everyone in Faerun can hold their own with a goblin or giant spider. So make sure you're not making all the wrong choices by mistake.

Also, I got wrecked in a few battles of Act 1 as well. Anytime I fight Githyanki I'm thinking, "Well, there goes half my health potions and revive scrolls." Don't be afraid of save scumming and don't be afraid to stack the deck in your favor. Long rest, drink elixirs, apply buffs, strategically place exploding barrels, and summon familiars if you expect a hard battle. And unless you're fighting a "boss" or an enemy that has lines of dialogue don't get concerned about pushing things off cliffs. With most you're not permanently losing good gear.

I wouldn’t say wrong - but there’s probably some nuance you’re overlooking. As a general rule healing is not super strong in D&D so you may want to forego having a dedicated healer, you also might want to focus on “control” spells that can either take an enemy out for a few turns or otherwise minimize their threat.

The gnolls with hyenas are very tough. They are probably the toughest thing before you go to the Underdark or into the mountain pass

Based on my DnD 5e experience, wizards like Gale come into their power once they get the Fireball spell, which happens at 5th level. Burning Hands is ok at lower levels but it tends to put the wizard in harm's way

Your party balance sounds reasonable. Better armor and higher constitution will help your paladin tank more over time

Keep going. It'll get easier and feel more natural over time

There are certainly some play styles that are less risk averse. I found wizards to be difficult to play early on, sorcerers less so, but still swishy without the right multiclass.

A fighter or barbarian makes fights much easier. It’s not that you don’t have a good front line, but shadow does no damage, astarion can’t really do his thing as a rogue yet, and gale is just weak early on. Can’t say much about paladins, but kitted out right should get you somewhere.

Personally, I’d swap gale out for someone like laezel. Or get a hirling and spec them out.

Fun fact, you can change the difficulty to balanced, make your multiclass, and then change back to explorer if you want. It’ll keep.

Try to use the environment. Eg for the church, there is an oil barrel that can cause a lot of damage. For gnolls try to use the high ground and you can turn the boss on the others. Sometimes it’s best just to attack first, Asterion can usually kill an enemy in the first round.

Are you using the terrain to your advantage? All of the fights you described getting wrecked at can become a breeze just by using the environment to your benefit.

I just stacked boxes to jump over the wall of priestess gut's room to get all the powder and oil barrels and everyone carries 3 or 4 depending on what their capacity is, and if I can't clear a battle normally I reload to the save before and sneak barrels strategically around and blow them all up from a distance.

As such I don't feel like there is a right or wrong way. Next play through I'm going to try not to do this but I know I'm inevitably going to try to come up with some really dumb cheese tactics.

Goblin camp you can just let gut drug you and dialogue then done. The drow what's her name you can sell out the Grove and then shoot the bridge down as she's leaving. The other guy you can void ball him into the pit next to his throne after the cutscene that makes him sit and invis or tp away with a scroll, or barrel bomb the whole room so no witnesses are left.

On the topic of utilizing Gale (or Wyll): The spell Cloud of Daggers is pretty useful early on with a bit of positioning. It won't get you singlehandedly through every fight, but you can make lots of fights easier by casting that spell in a choke point and forcing enemies to walk into it to get you.

Bonus points if you can upcast, more bonus if you position your paladin or cleric on the other side of the cloud to keep enemies in it or push them back in once they're through it. Ranged enemies will move into it if they can't see their targets, so hide your party arong corners to lure them in.

If you have gale and wyll, you can get two clouds going.