Garthanos
Arcadian Knight
Yeah, WotC seems really obsessed with the "work day" idea, but I think it's a chimera in many ways. Ultimately who really cares how long the "work day" is? I suppose it matters if there's a lot of kicking in the door dungeon grind expected. What you're really trying to avoid is the party totally going nova in the one fight they have. The real balancing is done by the action economy. Characters who can do too much in a round or, vice versa, too little, are the real problem IMO. For the most part, 5E got the action economy right (unlike some really notable bad examples in 4E... I'm looking at you bard, barbarian, and avenger).
There are encounter designs that really stress a character in one encounter and some characters are markedly more short rest dependent than others. Compare a party with a fighter, warlock, and monk to one with a paladin, sorcerer, and cleric. The latter benefits very little from short rests while the former is highly dependent on them and a big nasty fight is going to exhaust the resources of that party first. In a mixed party you can end up with some strange interactions and often pointless friction between character types. Of course, the issue of short rests in 5E has been an evergreen topic, so I won't go forward with it.
Gygax talked bout it honestly it isnt a new thing to pay attention to the workday it is introduced by having different characters having different scaled resources. (long rest - dailies whatever)
In 4e it hardly mattered what workday you had Wizards were still the best Dailies but only by a small amount everyone if the day was known to be short could pull out bigger guns. In 5e its back.
This was a fixed problem in my eyes... and why it gets brought up for 5e is because it can now make some classes shine a lot more than others especially if you have consistently shorter workdays which polls do indicate many people do.
(unlike some really notable bad examples in 4E... I'm looking at you bard, barbarian, and avenger).
I am curious about this. Those are really sound like they might be corner cases - we have a lot of character classes out now and none of those were phb.
Are you sure you are identifying the problem right? Avengers lack sufficient Nova and while that is definitely bad it isn't exactly/necessarily an action economy thing.
Barbarians can be regular whirling dervishes. It's almost the point.(are you sure its a problem) - The ranger is I think still king of strikers and he is from the PHB.
Bards can be so incredibly variable could you elaborate?