UngeheuerLich
Legend
If your party takes an extra round to defeat an elite, or a pair of brutes 'cos you're doing less damage, or soldiers 'cos you're missing .. it costs you extra pain.
That extra round means an additional extra round for the next couple of mobs .. in a large battle, it could mean for your "survivability build party," your foes get 20+ additional actions.
The number of additional actions your enemies get determines your survivability.
It's a cumulative effect. Each action they get costs you resources. Even if you win one fight, unless you're kitted out for laying waste, you may lose the next .. 'cos ... you're not going to get that much better at laying waste between encounters.
yes, as is waiting for your first action while everybody has a higher initiative than you... you act last, you receive more pain... hidden enemies, because your perception skill is too low (aka low wisdom), ranged attackers... domination... (aka thangs that you only pumped your attacks, now your friends are hit much harder)...
there is the cumulative effect of beeing hit too often: daily powers may be needed just to save your ass, because of a status effect hitting you may force some of your fellows to waste daily utilities to rescu you...
also: as I and others said earlier: fail at charop is not necesseraly a good ting: usually it means: combats are no fun, because they are either too easy or TPKs...
there are often easy ways to counter "optimized" characters if they don´t use absolutely broken combos (aka using 3.5 splatbooks mindlessly - and maybe even then), as optimization means lacking at all tasks you didn´t "optimize". The most funny thing is usually you don´t have to think too long about countering such characters, it happens automatically when you vary encounters a bit as a DM...
just to counter the next argument: but the party is optimized as a whole... just bring up scenarios where characters can´t set up the battlefield perfectly... and don´t hesitate to exploit the single characters weaknesses...
often character only look optimized, because the DM is too merciful with "imbalanced" characters...