Other characters are assumed but their precise contributions vary soo much from party to party that no assumptions are being made. I suppose you could count the assumption that they get in the way of AOE spells as one thing that is baked into the AOE target numbers.
I addressed these points with a counterpoint not long ago. Talking about the counterpoint would be interesting. Just repeating your previous point and ignoring the counterpoint raised tends to just take the discussion toward repeating the point and counterpoint ad nauseum.
Fixing things mid-edition isn't new or unusual.
A change of this magnitude is, at least to me.
So every encounter is a single boss monster? 4-8 enemies (1 boss, a couple lieutenants and 3-4 henchmen) within 80-120 feet (many high level aoes have 40-60ft radii) of each other is just beyond any kind of reasonable encounter building scenario? DMs just don't even think about challenging parties to make appropriate damage priority decisions at high level?
Well, I'm already on record as believing WotC the corporation caved to social pressure and online complaining on this, even if some of the devs were in favor of it before. But it hardly matters now.
My guess is that the whireroom will be something like four flying adamantine golems throwing rocks from difficult terrain below for the Fighter against 50 goblins squeezed in a cage for the wizard to avoid anything like that.
I’m actually a little interested in how many enemies @Maxperson expects a level 11 party to see in an average encounter. For me the number would probably be 3-4. Some encounters with 1-2. Some with 3-4. Some with 5–10.
