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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9652522" data-attributes="member: 6877472">So I'm running a game with an all-caster party.  Here's what I've noticed:*Fights take awhile, as the party has to whittle down vast HP pools.  *About 50% of battles (unless I can find ways to really get them to stretch their resources) are almost pointless to actually run.  The enemies are alive and kicking, but they're often rendered impotent by magic, and most of the fight is waiting for their hit points to run out.*The other half of fights, they're on the back foot, and have to dig deep to just stay alive.  I can expect someone to go down and have to be brought back up with magical healing at least once.It's really kind of wonky, as I never know which fight is going to turn into a cakewalk or a total nightmare.  The CR system really breaks down here, because battles that by the numbers shouldn't be that hard have gone way south, and battles I thought would be a PITA were won fairly easily.  Another game a friend of mine is running is martial-heavy, and what he reports is that, the party has great damage and tends to end fights quickly, but has little staying power, as they simply hemorrhage hit points in battle (no shield users, Barbarians are always using Reckless Attack, he has a melee Rogue in the party).  Sometimes they're wanting to take short rests after each fight, which isn't viable, and the most combats he can pack in a "game day" comes out to 3.5 on average.  With no real way to reliably crowd control large packs of enemies (outside of the Cleric's Spirit Guardians) or get enemies to  focus on hard targets (outside of, ironically, the Cleric's Spirit Guardians), the enemies will jump the biggest threat and pound them into paste because nobody has any active defenses (like Shield) to mitigate incoming damage (I mean, the Barbarian has Rage, but he's like the one Barbarian in existence that doesn't have the Bear Totem power, so there's lots of damage he can't cut in half).  Plus, there are some kinds of encounters he simply can't use against the party, because they lack answers for them, and he dreads any time he has to use a spellcaster- usually they go down fast, but the wrong spell can really mess up the group- they live in fear of Slow and howled in fury when a Druid used Spike Growth against them.Which I guess makes sense, the game kind of wants you to have a balanced party for just these reasons.  The problem is, there's this rather common belief that it doesn't really matter what you play, as long as someone has the ability to cast healing spells.</blockquote>

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