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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Amaroq" data-source="post: 5125352" data-attributes="member: 15470">Both a player and a DM, here.As a player, I'm definitely running into this: I've actually levelled without using a Daily <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" />, which strikes me as badly wrong.  All I'll say is, when its obvious that something's a boss fight, I tend to think I need my dailies; when something isn't, I'm fully confident my party can dance through it without losses, so I'll go through Encounter powers as a first choice .. by the time I'm through them, I'm looking at a mop-up situation, where it rarely feels like the fight hangs in the balance. If it still hangs in the balance, sure, I'm going Daily, and probably even before I use the final Encounter.If something's obviously a climactic or boss encounter, then I unload my top Dailies from the get-go.What's happening in our campaign, though, is our DM is aiming for a bit more sumulationism, and rarely gives us sufficient encounters in a day to push through most of our Healing Surges, etc .. so we'll often get to a day's rest with 75% of our Surges and most of our Dailies.  . . . From a DM's perspective, I've tended to play a much "hotter" campaign, with the bad guys often coming in large but relatively weak numbers .. but just coming in wave after wave, rarely ever giving the party time to rest. I fully expect this next encounter path to result in their characters virtual clock-watching, waiting for 12 hours to have passed so that they can try to take an extended rest. That style seems to encuorage sporadic Daily use, either for minion-slaughter, or when its clear that somebody is a lot stronger than the minions they've been fighting. My PCs skidded into their last extended rest with no dailies between 'em, one character dead, and two more characters down, including one character on zero healing surges .. while still able to win the day. . . .I'm wondering how much of this is the "continual stream of L+4 encounters", if I'm reading your post right. Personally, as a player I'm not bad at judging the encounters our DM throws at us which are "hard"er than the others, and using my Dailies on them. If you're throwing nine encounters which are all "hard" at them, maybe they aren't reading any of them as "hard" and therefore worth using a Daily?You might try varying encounter difficulty sufficiently, with a couple "easy" fights (maybe using terrain to keep them tactically interesting), and the "hard" fights clearly distinguishable from them. Think lieutenant, mini-boss, boss ... You can lead into these simply by naming the lieutenant before they get to him. "The last orc staggers back, and falls to his knees. He spits out one last curse .. 'Ashtuk .. will .. kill you ...' ..."  ("I chop off his head.") ("Okay, he's dead.")  ...... Two encounters later, they burst into a room, and start slaughtering more orcs on a Surprise round. On their first turn of action, one of the orcs shouts "Ashtuk!! Help!" ... and your lieutenant, accompanied by a pair of big burly brute/soldier types, makes his entrance around the end of Round 2.A.) The party have burned through encounter powers in 2 rounds of weak-orc-slaughter.B.) The party know that Ashtuk is a bad-ass, because you've referred to him by name a couple times leading up to it.C.) Your description indicates that he and his pair are buffer than the orcs they've been fighting, so they know that this is a tougher-than-expected fight.D.) Ashtuk's first attack, possibly a Daily, ought to be scary. . . . The other approach you can take is simply making it clear that one or more party members are in trouble: grab and kidnap, stun, dominate, separate from the party, etc ... this puts a time pressure on the combat: we don't just have to win, we have to win now; that will encourage Daily use.A creature with below-average hit points, but well above-average damage, can entice Dailies. After he whomps on somebody hard enough, the Defender will know he has to engage, and everybody is going to want to take down the enemy Striker before he can deal a lot more damage.Artificial time limit encounters work very well: think Bond-villain, with some minions who are slowly cranking up the ballista that is going to shoot the captive Bond-girl as soon as they have it cranked up. The party doesn't know how many rounds thats going to take - and there's plenty of traps and bad guys between here and there. That'll entice some Dailies out of 'em!</blockquote>

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