I am trying to come up with the best way to create overlapping sprites without having any issues. I was thinking of having a SortedDictionary and setting the Entity's key to it's Y position relative to the max bound of the simulation, aka the Z value. I'd update the "Z" value in the update method each frame, if the entity's position has changed at all.

For those who don't know what I mean, I want characters who are standing closer in front of another character to be drawn on top, and if they are behind the character, they are drawn behind.

I'm leery of using SpriteBatch back to front or front to back, I've been doing some searching and have been under the impression they are a bad idea. and want to know exactly how other people are dealing with their depth sorting.

Just ultimately trying to come up with the best method of sorting for good practice before I get too far in to refactor the system effectively.