Recently, I started my second campaign in Baldurs Gate in addition to the campaign I play with my wife in co-op. My wife and I opted for the easiest difficulty in our playthrough since neither if us ever played similar game.
This time I felt like it would be such a breeze since I already know a bit more about the game and DnD in general. I opted for the balanced mode with my new character and started going through Act I and boy oh boy do I get wrecked almost everywhere. Multiple of my characters already died and I had to revive them.
Characters
Including Gale, which in turn triggered cool mini-quest to revive him, but the magic aura around his dead body killed Astarion multiple times.
I feel very scared going into each combat and trying to plan as much in advance as possible (keep in mind I mostly know what awaits me there, because I've gone through Act I already).
Where I got wrecked
I got wrecked at the church before you get to Whithers, I got wrecked by the hyenas and gnolls by the caravan road, I got absolutly wrecked by the Paladins of Tar and
I just don't know what am I doing wrong.
My party
I play as high elf paladin and most of my encounters so far I've had Astarion, Gale, and Shadow in my party. I feel like the only actually useful member is Astarion. I probably don't know how to utilize Gale well enough and my Tav paladin just feels like a paper-thin wall between the enemy and the rest of the party.
Are these early encounters in Act I intentionally challenging so that the game "force-teaches" you to utilize everything at your disposal and will it get easier later on or am I just on the wrong path with my character and my party? Honestly, I can't imagine going through the goblin camp in this state.
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:
You gave lots of good advice, but I strongly disagree with this point:
If you wait until a player is downed then you lose 3 full action rounds, which has a huge impact. You lose the round that the player is down, the action from the player who gets them back up, and then the action from the downed character the turn after they get up. It's much better to use bonus actions or positioning to keep a player from going down in the first place.
You don't lose an action to get them back up. Healing Word is a bonus action. Healing before going down actually wastes many many more actions, because yeah you're spending the actions to heal all the time instead of doing damage/disables and removing enemies from the fight. Damage prevention in killing/disabling enemies is much better than healing against it, since healing spells have so small values compared to damage spells. Just compare Cure Wounds and Chromatic Orb.
In fact I haven't even said the best benefit of only using healing spells when someone goes down: if an enemy does 30 damage per round and you try to heal against it, you need to heal 30 hp per round, good luck ever achieving that. But if you heal only when someone goes down, you can heal as little as 1hp, with exactly the same effect. Essentially you're using minimal resources, can do that heal with lvl 1 spell slots, while keeping one strong enemy essentially stunned since they "waste" their turn re-downing the one character that just gets healed by 1hp each round.