You will want a warrior class, BUT... the key to surviving this game early is focus on ranged weapons. If you go mano-a-monster in the low levels, you will die a lot! BG1, perhaps unintentionally, plays to the style of keeping enemies at arms length. There are even places in the game where you can safely distance yourself using natural features and shoot enemies like fish in a barrel. For this reason, Archers totally rule if you can discipline yourself to stay out of melee! Otherwise, regular Fighter works well.

Second tier are all the other rangers, paladins, and multi-class fighters due to limited weapons skill and armor restrictions. Berserkers don't do ranged well, making them a 3rd level, Kensai are hopeless for new players.

But here's the thing: This is NOT a modern gratification game with balance to accommodate your preferred play style. It's about tactics. If you charge into your enemies, you die. That simple. If you move cautiously and lure enemies one by one to your bow users, you win. Slow and steady is how you win and survive.

Answer depends on chosen difficulty mode.

Why worry so much, if you may even choose to toggle the extra Story Mode difficulty checkbox any time?

Also, there are 29 story companions in the first game covering many classes, multi-classing and even some dual-classing options. Additionally, there's the "Create Party" button for single-player mode, where you may choose to create more than your single player character. Doesn't mean you must create six party members. You might want to create 1-2 companions for essential roles within your party. As a bonus, custom companions transfer into the second game unchanged whereas story companions get reset to game defaults or may not be available in the second game.