Corinth
First Post
The answer is in crowd control.ZombieRoboNinja said:But you don't WANT per-encounter balancing. You want everything to be basically at-will, except after a few rounds you have to start spending half your actions "recharging" powers.
How would this work for "leader" classes? Either WOTC would have to cut out powerful per-encounter healing spells, or else the party could literally keep fighting forever, because the cleric's dishing out a huge heal every other round.
How would it work for controller/"artillery" classes in large-scale battles? A level 10 wizard can just hover over an entire army of orcs and toss out fireballs until every goblinoid is face-down in the mud? (Of course, he might need to have a cleric with him to keep him healed forever.)
Hell, even striker classes would be messed up. With no recharge mechanic, you can give rogues per-encounter abilities that let them vanish, or skitter away from the middle of a melee without taking damage. But if all they have to do is spend a round out to recharge, they can just backstab > vanish > recharge indefinitely.
In other words, you only think in-combat recharges are a good idea because in sources like Bo9S, the classes using maneuvers were the ones who traditionally had limitless resources anyway. A 3e fighter (or warblade) could battle all day and night without losing effectiveness, but he was limited because the cleric would run out of healing spells eventually. In 4e, they want ALL classes to have similar pacing, which means EVERYONE needs limits. Infinite recharges, even if they have an opportunity cost of a round, are broken.
The healer heals nothing when he's held, silenced, or polymorphed into a sheep. The striker strikes nothing when he's encased in a block of ice. The defender defends nothing if he's rooted in place. No one does anything if they are stunned. Lock out, shut down, close off, and then maneuver into position before focus-firing the primary target down. (Always, always focus your group's firepower on a single target at a time when you can; the faster a group kills their enemies, the faster they win the fight.)
This is how you deal with in-combat recharging of anything. It's why Controllers exist, and why groups that know how to best exploit various powers of crowd control are superior in a fight to groups that don't.