How to achieve these tactics

I have found the AI to be lacking. If I am not attacking someone with my main character then all my followers just stand around. And if I change their targeting behaviour to "defend" they stand around until someone starts doing damage to me. Very frustrating.

In doing a small amount of reading, it seems the developers really want you to use the "tactical" camera for fights. This gives you complete control over every moment, but it feels really tedious. The experience improves slightly with practice I think, but overall I don't like having to control 4 characters individually.

Varric is always running into fights on me when I don't want him to. I love him as a follower for the banter, but man hes useless in a fight. Runs right up to a freaking dragon. I stopped resurrecting him and turned up his potion reserve so he would stop draining resources from the rest of the party during a fight.

I cannot speak about the "preferred" spell since I am just happy that my followers are looking in the right direction half the time. My hope would be that developers see the feedback (and these issues are pretty obvious) and patch a thing or two, but I'm not holding out for it...

Apparently, if you set ranged party members to follow themselves (e.g. set Varric to follow Varric) it makes them stay at max possible distance.

Sadly I have no solution for preferred abilities usage.

I can't reproduce the "archer runs to combat" issue. I've been running with Varric and he always stays as far behind as he can.

The one exception to this is Varric has no line of sight to an enemy, he will run towards them until he had line of sight. So make sure that your tank isn't keeping the target out of sight.

Second, Vivienne. Spirit Blade is a great spell. I set it as a 'Preferable' status on the tactics page, but this doesn't always ensure that vivienne will always be attacking with this spell unless I intervene directly. I don't suppose there is anyway to force her to always attack with this spell if she has mana?

There are two parts to this.

• Setting the spell as preferred will lead to this spell being used. If other spells are set to preferred as well, the AI will situationally choose between preferred spells, so you can't guarantee that Spirit Blade will be used.
• By default, the AI is set to preserve 50% of its mana/stamina pool. This is done to ensure that the AI doesn't spam attacks and depletes the pool, and instead reserves resources to that the player can give instructions with proper timing. If Spirit Blade is a costly attack, the AI might be bumping against the threshold and therefore decided to not cast it. Lower the threshold.