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Message: <blockquote data-quote="spinozajack" data-source="post: 6639543" data-attributes="member: 6794198">I was talking about using your encounter powers up front if they are striker powers. (which are, if you are playing to win the battle, usually the ones you want). If you have a way to generate 4e's advantage, like Oath of Enmity, or other similar benefits like damage vulnerability, then it does make tactical sense to wait for the right moment to bust out encounters or dailies and on the right target. But grind is generated by not being able to reduce enemy HP quickly, and the fight lasts many rounds, even to the point of a slow depletion of HP on both sides like WWI and attrition. It's not fun. If you want combat not to grind, you need to make sure you have a decent accuracy, and the whole group concentrate on taking one enemy off the board at a time, sometimes on the BBEG, other times on the minions (who might be a better use of early round actions because you don't waste big damage powers to take out minions). But if your strikers can rush by and kill the BBEG in round one or two, and your support artillery know to help you clean up the trash mobs, then you can end most fights early and without losing much HP. Most 4e "balanced" fights are lost due to players playing terribly and without tactics, running off and doing their own thing, spreading around damage. Once you figure out that the way to end combats quickly is to concentrate fire, then it's fairly easy to win almost any "balanced" encounter your DM will throw at you. At which point it becomes a quection of, why is the term "balanced" meaning an encounter PCs are supposed to win in the first place? Balance is not 80-20, it's 50-50 odds of either side winning. By definition. So I don't think 4e was balanced, I think PCs had such an unfair advantage that it was basically a shooting gallery.I do like the idea of balance, and even 5e doesn't provide it. Otherwise every battle would have a 50-50 chance of TPK. Right now, it doesn't. Monsters are way too easy to kill after tier 1. In 4e, it was the same. So if I'm to say something positive about 4e, it's that it had some good ideas but poor execution. And that its ideas weren't followed through with monster difficulty. But again, that's a critique that applies to 5e as well. The default game is on easy mode. Three death saves? Fairly safe to play in those conditions. You just need one DC 10 to stop the bleeding. An enemy might need a 16 to hit your PC, and several hits to drop them, plus three more until they die, plus three rounds of their allies failing DC 10 checks. The odds are so overwhelmingly stacked in PC's favor it's hilarious to call this kind of thing a challenge or balanced. 4e was much the same.</blockquote>

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