We started using the DMG guidelines and suddenly the phenomenon we did not want was gone. What wasn't gone was going to 0 hp or PC death. So going to 0 hp went from normal and not much of a threat because whack-a-PC to more uncommon but scarier. So it did fix the issue with the tone of the game.It seems to me that solving whack-a-pc by simply using combats that won’t cause a PC to reach 0 isn’t a very good solution to the problem.