Here's what I don't get about the thread: the "problem" of alpha striking parties that is "inherent" in the system seems to hint that the parties who do this take only encounters and dailies that do a lot of damage.
What about all the powers that push, pull, slide or otherwise affect the encounter area? Do alpha striking parties not have any of these powers? And does this lack not ever adversely affect them? Because if the players are able to consistently finish encounters easily purely by virtue of doing a lot of damage, then I think the advice of "build better encounters" is pretty useful.
Well, I don't think it is really like that. All sorts of powers are handy when you want to unload on team monster. The wizard might toss a daily to AoE some monsters, AP, and toss out another attack to slow down some other monsters. The Warlord might toss out a daily to bunch some monsters together for the Wizard to fry, and then use an AP to grant the Fighter an MBA or buff all the other character's attacks. The strikers will probably unleash their most damaging assaults, but that is pretty much their schtick. A well-coordinated party is probably NOT all about nothing but dealing damage and is probably more effective using a good mix of powers.
If the PCs only choose to do damage as hard and as fast as they can because that's all they've ever needed to do to be successful, how is that a failing of the game rather than a failing of the encounters?
Likewise, why is it more tense to use "big" powers later in the fight rather than earlier? Isn't it just as tense to be out of heals, out of encounters, and trying to knock off the last few guys with at-wills before they kill you? Tension comes from depleting you resources and still having to fight on. Getting to round 3 with all your encounters and dailies does not equal more tension; it equals less. I have more options available to me.
This gets into the design of 4e. Lets look at it in contrast to AD&D (any flavor). In AD&D both sides are fundamentally glass cannons (the PCs definitely are and if the monsters are a threat they are too). If a party unleashes its 'alpha strike' the enemy is done for, and the encounter ends right there. Tension exists because death is always around the corner. You succeed mostly by arranging things so you get the drop on the enemy. Or the tension arises because the party has shot its wad and now has to hope they can high tail it out of dodge without running into anything too deadly so they can recharge.
4e effectively reduced the lethality of the most potent attacks. What it didn't, and to some extent can't, do is get rid of fundamental tactical logic. Striking hard and early is still the best tactic. If you're going to unload there's rarely a better time to do it than round 1. The problem arises because the monsters are still standing on round 2. They're decimated and they will go down, the outcome of the fight is no longer the issue. However you now have 4-5 more rounds of combat where the party needs to still finish off team monster, and either doesn't have or doesn't want to further dig into its supply of the good stuff. So you fall back to at-will and encounter powers that will do the job, but you have to spend 30-40 minutes in cleanup.
From the monster's perspective it is pretty much the same. They have usually got one or two nice one-use powers. They're going to pretty much unload those on round 1 as well, and then spend the rest of the fight trying to do as much damage as they can before they inevitably die.
So 4e fights, at least the important ones, tend to boil down to both sides unleashing quickly and then the action tends to slow down into slugfest mode. This is where the problem comes in.
Some of the ideas here are interesting, but I don't think I buy into the basic premise of the "problem." Saying the game is broken based on an out of context quote is a shaky foundation, but on top of that, I've never seen any evidence of this phenomenon in any of the games I've played. If it was a shortcoming inherent in the system, this wouldn't be true.
I recognize that it's possible that I've just been lucky in this regard, but honestly, if your players only choose powers with high damage expressions at the expense of battlefield control and succeed by doing so, the problem isn't with the game.
Well, the solutions proposed all boil down to trying to entice the players into not using their big guns right off. It isn't really a matter of damaging vs other sorts of powers. The PCs could use mostly powers with only secondary damage effects, the result then is just monsters that are all loaded with debilitating conditions. Either way the fight slows down, and in the second case it may actually slog more because cleanup takes longer.
I see two mechanical fixes. Either go back to the sort of 'Russian roulette' of earlier days where the potent powers on both sides are devastating and end the fight or induce the players not to strike right off.
The third solution is good encounter design, but there is an element of Oberroni Fallacy in there. Just because good play can make the game work well doesn't make it not a problem with the game itself. I think what I've proposed is that the medicine may be worse than the disease. That of course is open to question and in any case a matter of personal preference.
So maybe you aren't lucky, maybe you just have a very good sense of how to make encounters that work really well. In that case 4e works fine for you and there's no real need to think about it. My experience is I can USUALLY make it work well, but there are those encounters that just don't turn out the way you'd like, and they do usually drag when that happens.
