By the way, are there any interesting melee/mage combos, aside from ciphers?
Really depends what you want to do. Anyone using a shield has better deflection, so it's always useful to have one nearby and anyone can use scrolls as long as their Lore is high enough.
Give a melee weapon to your mage, use Eldritch Aim + defensive spells or cast touch spells like Fan of Flames or Sunless Grasp (all level 1 spells). Increase Resolve to have better concentration too, you don't want those spells to be interrupted. Oh and don't forget Grimoire Slam and Arcane Veil.
Go Druids and shape-shift to ripe enemy apart while still being able to cast spells.
Go Chanter, because naming your own chants is awesome.
Go Priest (mace and shield for the cliché portrait) and select Berath as your got, pick the Pallid Hand talent to get a Wizard's spell (and accuracy bonus with mace and great swords).
Yeah, I noticed that, so I think having a "tanky" Paladin, Barbarian and so on is possible, but I suspect only Fighters can be proper tanks. We'll see soon enough.
Min/maxers claim Paladins and Monk make better tank than Fighters. Paladins because of their higher defenses thanks to Faith&Conviction and Monks because they have somewhat crazy abilities at higher level (i.e. deflect arrows and stuff like that).
Fighters makes the best lower level tanks though.
And because people are posting faster then me. Paladins are support/tank/dps, but not as much as clerics or chanters. They don't have spells. They can have auras (passive aoes) and commands (single target)...the "can" is because you need to select those things at level up.
