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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7402893" data-attributes="member: 996">Some groups have never seen the 5MWD, others have rarely seen anything else.  The prescribed encounters/day for optimal 'balance' is present in 5e (and was there, if not very functional, in 3e, to be fair), as is the short/long rest model, and at-will, short-rest, and daily recharge abilities for most classes in one form or another.  So, as in 4e, a group can tend towards few if any rests, many or few short rests, or frequent long rests even to the point of the FMWD.  The difference is whether and how much that distorts balance.  4e was more robust, a 5MWD would make encounters noticeably easier as everyone just unloaded all the dailies they could, but /everyone/ would've been unloading dailies, so class balance wasn't profoundly impacted - similarly, if you had to face a series of encounters without even a short rest, everyone was equally stressed by the lack of surge healing & encounter powers (obviously, Essentials shifted both those a little).  In 5e, as in 3e & classic D&D, there are classes with most of their effectiveness concentrated in daily resources and others that have most of their less-versatile power always on tap, in addition, you have a class or sub-class or few that have a lot of power concentrated in short-rest-recharge abilities.  So, if you vary the ratio of encoutners:short-rest:long-rest from the ideal (6-8:2-3:1), you produce inevitable imbalances among those different sorts of classes.And, no, we can't point to the 6-8 encounter/day as retained from 4e, 4e had no strongly stated intended-balance point like that, and CR goes back to 3e, anyway.  (That said, I think Mearls or someone did let slip that they initially expected 6-8 encounter days, but when it turned out that rarely ever happened in practice, they beefed up the MM3 monsters a bit, so that a 4-encounter-or-so day would be more challenging - IDK, it's one of /those/ memories, probably hearsay.  :shrug:  ) Even with a solid defender, everyone was going to get hurt, some of the time.  You could get really overly-'optimized' defenders who just sucked damage to themselves like a black hole, but they did, indeed, become inefficient for just the reason Cap pointed out - defenders have the most/biggest surges, but everyone else has surges, too, and if they're never touched, the defender actually becomes the weakest link.  Either he backs off or pulls a Boromir, at that point - but, hey congrats on being so optimal.(Defender, BTW, not something 5e kept from 4e, the two defender-in-4e classes in the 5e PH are both Essentials-Slayer-style Strikers.)</blockquote>

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