There are so many worthy characters that it's tough to choose from once you've got options. Plus their different interactions when walking around is fucking hilarious, haha (anyone with Oghren is MONEY).

>My only issue right now is that my damn mages won't stay far
>enough away from my frontline cats. I have to manually back
>them up which not only is annoying but costs me time. Maybe
>switching to the ranged behavior set will do the trick.

Yeah, I roll with Ranged for both Morrigan and Wynne. I tried using the two-mage set up (main char is a rogue) but it becomes a bit too complex for me; if you had to though, Wynne is much more self sufficient under AI than Morrigan. If you do this though, invest all your early skill points for Wynne into Combat Tactics; TRUST me on this.

>
>Lastly...I have a serious dilemma. Without a rouge in the
>party, I can't open any chests or disarm traps. Either I have
>to sacrifice my vicious two Mage lineup or I have to use skill
>points on lock picking rather than something else. Decisons,
>decisions lol.

A rogue is CLUTCH, haha. I'm very glad I picked a rogue as my main character so I could shape him into what I want. I've found stealth, lockpicking and trap making/detecting to be extremely useful throughout the game. Hold position, stealth, run around disarming traps/setting my own, then aggro the enemies around the corner into my waiting party. Wash, rinse, repeat. One nice thing about lockpicking and/or disarming traps is that you get XP each time you do it, so it can add up pretty quickly.