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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Iron Sky" data-source="post: 5075061" data-attributes="member: 60965">In our experience, at Heroic the lack of familiarity with your characters (and the rules if you're just starting 4e) is offset by the limited number of options players have.  The familiarity and general comfort with the rules at higher levels is offset by the vastly increased number of options and conditions to keep track of.For our group, combats actually got much faster as we proceeded through Heroic and got more comfortable with how to play our characters and how to work together.  Also, we got more specialized and our damage output and the quantity/quality of status effects we could drop went up so we killed things alot faster.When we hit Paragon, things slowed down a bit as we adjusted to our new powers, improved/retrained feats, and increased monster status-effect dealing, but then began to speed up as we became more comfortable with our characters.  Also, our damage output spiked dramatically at Paragon (Stormwarden, Daggermaster, Studen of Caiphon, Radiant Servant) so we were killing things even faster than before.From the DM side, higher level monsters take a little more time to design, but, IMO, it's balanced by the fact that you can give them more interesting/flavorful powers so they're more fun to design.If you have the monster builder, most of the time is spent in the power-making part (the fun part) since it pre-calculates most of the other stuff(HP, defenses, etc) for you.With the monster builder, you also have probably somewhere around 800-1000 pre-made monsters that you can just take and use, modify, and/or reflavor right there in the program.  Before my game went on a hiatus, I got to the point where I could throw together an improvised random encounter from scratch in a few minutes.The monsters have more abilities triggered in more different ways (I usually forget about auras until about half-way through the fight) and more powers/recharge powers to keep track of.  After a couple rounds DMing a fight, I usually have the monsters' shtick down and my side of things speeds up.The biggest slowdown we've noticed in higher-level play is all the conditional effects from class abilities, feats, and powers.  I don't think a round goes by without someone saying "Oh, I should have done 5 more damage to that guy since he was cold vulnerable" or "Damn!  I have an immediate interrupt against Will attacks that raises my Will by 4!"We also just picked up our game again after a year hiatus on our game...  trying to pick up a level 16 character after not looking at them for a year is a bit of an adjustment.</blockquote>

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