I am playing through as a cipher and no regrets at all: it is sooo much better than wizard. Somehow here is how the two work respectively:
Cipher: I spam three abilities: one that paralyzes an enemy and stops enemies near from moving, one that hurts everything near a friend a little, and one that hurts one thing near a friend a lot.
None of these abilities are friendly fire, none of them require weird angling, two of them require a friend engaged in melee with the targets, which fortunately is 90% of the time in battle.
All my abilities seem to have long range, wherever I target, my character goes into a casting animation.
Wizard: every damaging spell hurts my friends. Except magic missile, so I spam that. There is no way to tell (unless I am missing a cursor), where an AoE spell is going to hit, and since INT expands the area, no way to memorize it like in BG2 or 1 (frankly, I can't see why a cursor indicating where a spell is going to hit is so impossible to accomplish, Dark Sun: Shattered lands which BG1 ripped off in many ways already had such a cursor at it released in 1993!)
I found the cursor: expert mode, thanks etgfrog!
Now, you say, wizards are controllers not damagers! Well the best control spells I've seen (bedazzle and variants) also breeds weirdness, as in the confused enemies are not enemies while confused, breaking engagements and leaving you unable to attack.
Worse, none of the key spells seem to have good range, so when you want to confuse a group of enemies, you find your wizard running through the front ranks to cast it.
I like the grimoire mechanic, but that is really all. I really don't like not being able to repick useless cipher spells. Each level has one spell that I picked badly and find useless: charm isn't that great, lasts no time at all and rarely comes into play since your allies helpfully kill the target while you take a really long time to cast, or they kill its' friends, so the charm is meaningless. Second level I picked the spell that flanks everyone for synergy with a rogue for constant sneak attack. However, now I have a full cast of official npcs, so of course, no rogue.
Also are those stories that the golden kickstarter backer characters standing around the world reveal to you, also written by the kicstarter backers? Because they are A. kinda bad B. Kinda offensive, it seems like every other one is a weird torture fantasy with elves plunging fingers into the wounds of bleeding women during home invasions, assassins plunging daggers into people while they are being pleasured by courtesans in excessive detail and home invasions with threats of child torture. If these are backer written or backer inspired: this is why we can't have nice things!
I stopped reading them after like the fourth weird sex torture fantasy.
Great game, nevertheless