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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5199027" data-attributes="member: 58197">I hate freely available raise dead magic. I'm in a sizeable minority there, but it definitely does seem to be a minority.Speaking just for myself, the "grind" problem is not with long combats per se; it's when the outcome of the combat is clear long before the combat itself is over. The PCs are obviously going to win, but there's still a bunch of mopping up to do. The DM is reluctant to handwave the rest of the fight, because it remains in question how many hit points and healing surges the PCs will have to spend, but the tension is gone.A long, grueling nail-biter of a battle is awesome, albeit stressful (I definitely need a few minutes to unwind afterward!). To me, the best battle is one where the winning side has a net hit point total less than zero. As a DM, though, it's a challenge to achieve that without fudging the dice--you're skirting the edge of a TPK.This can be an issue in 4E for various reasons, one of which is that I find party power level drifts upward relative to monsters of their level. When my PCs were in Heroic tier, I got a pretty good feel for what they could handle; level + 1 or less wasn't worth playing out, level + 2 was a solid fight but not tremendously challenging, level + 3 they would have to work for, level + 4 was blood and death, and level + 5 was TPK territory.As they move up through Paragon tier, however, I find those guidelines no longer apply. Anything less than level + 4 is too weak to bother with. Level + 5 is the new level + 3. I expect it'll get even worse if we go into Epic. I think I've got a handle on it now, but there were a bunch of overly easy fights before I realized what was happening.Incidentally, have you tried "War of the Burning Sky?" You might like it; I think the encounters are better calibrated to what you're looking for.</blockquote>

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