DAO is more on the acceptable side of mediocre, especially once you mod it. It
wasn't "very good."
Fuck Awakening. Do
sea's mod
Thirst instead.
Arcane Warrior Mage is pretty much easy mode, except your Arcane Warrior is just going to be a spellcaster in plate, since Arcane Warrior offers jack shit in terms of attack abilities, you can't cast with most weapons in hand, and it is just a pure set of tanking abilities to make your Mage an unkillable juggernaut that outtanks everything, so you generally end up just using a staff and spellcasting in plate. For bonus points get 12 strength and the Rock Armor spell so you can wear a leather armor set in Ostagar and have more armor than anyone (with a bit more strength you can wear the heavier armor sets too). Aside from that I recommend you put all your stat points into Magic since it also pumps your healing and mana potions so really, it's the only stat you need (except for a smidge of Cunning to get Coercion up). Play Nightmare difficulty, and contemplate installing
Slinks S3 Ravage if you want a challenge and you may want to install the
Grease Fire un-nerf (but Grease Fire is pretty broken pre-nerf if you use it yourself and utterly worthless after they stealth nerfed it in 1.04; mostly this is recommended because there is a memorable Tower of Ishal fight where enemies use Grease Fire against your party and if you play with the nerfed version that fight is just a stupid joke).
For pure bugfixing, I recommend installing
Dain's Fixes,
Qwinn's Ultimate Fixpack, and
Two Specializations Sten. You might also want to install
Detailed Tooltips and
Advanced Tactics. Definitely get ready to either edit their tactics or disable them (if you want to disable tactics, it's best to empty their tactics slots but leave tactics active so they still autoattack properly) and manually control the party. With manual party control the game gets pretty easy.
Paging
Lilura to add DAO mod recommendations.