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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Riastlin" data-source="post: 5504428" data-attributes="member: 94022">In my experience, the grind was nothing at low heroic.  Sure, the first couple of times we played, it took a bit but that was because we were learning a new system.  Now, we can easily get 3, and maybe 4 encounters in during a 3.5 hour session at low-heroic.  The difference is the hit points.  New monster damage hasn't affected this (at low-heroic) either, but it has made it more interesting.  My level 4 runepriest cannot simply wait for the big bad encounter of the day to pull out his daily and daily utility.  When the wizard and fighter have a combined total of 10 HP, its a pretty good time to whip out Shield of Sacrifice, regardless of whether or not its an early fight.  In either event though, the number of combats hasn't really changed at low levels from my experience.Late heroic and into paragon though is much different.  The fights were just long and dragging before the update (or more specifically before I started to apply the update).  Not only were they long (sure the PCs are doing more damage, but not that much more damage) but they were not interesting either.  It was almost always clear early on that the fight would be won by the PCs regardless of what they did.  In many respects it lead to sloppy play (no real need to think about tactics for instance).  The thought that the ranger might take 114 points of damage on the first monster's first turn never crossed the PCs minds.  That, has certainly now changed though.We can still easily get 3-4 encounters in during the day (not including skill challenges and the like) but it just requires more careful encounter building.  As Aegeri stated, its no longer a matter of having to find challenging monsters (which usually meant monsters at least a few levels higher than the PCs) and then hoping their defenses would be high enough to give the players some pause (which, oh by the way, made the grind that much more of a pain).  Now even a monster of party level or 1 or 2 below party level can threaten the party.</blockquote>

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