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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Blue" data-source="post: 8181465" data-attributes="member: 20564">Since we do seem to be all over tangents in this thread, I don't mind mentioning this:The 6-8 encounters deals with two different and important issues.  One is deadliness, and you can throw few/more deadly encounters and balance it.The other is the balance point between at-will (like rogues or EB-only warlocks) and long-rest recovery classes (like casters) and some hybrids (like paladins or barbarians).  For that it comes down to efficiency per action.  For example a over a statistically significant number of rounds a rogue or an EBing warlock will have a fairly static expected output per round.For casters on the other hand, an action using a highest level slot and an action with a cantrip can vary significantly.  High level spells will do more than a martial at-will action, which will do more than a cantrip.  ("Do more" is subjective because much magic doesn't do single target damage, but still able to be evaluated if in a soft way.)So there needs to have enough actions occurring in the day to force enough cantrip usage to average into the per-action value of the high level slots to bring down that effectiveness to what the at-will classes are doing.  Otherwise the long-rest-recovery classes have a higher average effectiveness per action, for the same number of actions, and are overpowered.And it's even a bit more complex than that.  You can't just have long but few combats because a number of long-rest recovery uses are more efficient than more, shorter combats.  A 1-minute buff will last a 3 round combat or an 8 round combat, with more total effectiveness for the action used to cast it in the latter case.  Another easy way to think about it is what's more effective - a barbarian who can rage in half the combats for the day or in all of them?  So simply lengthening combats linearally helps but is not enough.(And all of this ignores short-rest recovery classes, which can be handled differently by DMs as well.)This isn't saying that every adventuring day should be 6-8 combats.  This is saying that the balance point should have as many times above that as below that.  (And my personal opinion is I wish they gave out a lot less slots and balanced it significantly lower becuase no one I know regularly runs that many encounters, including myself.)So I am with you that it's critically important when rating classes and subclasses that everyone does so in the same context in terms of encounters per day and per short rest because it's critically important in relative class power.</blockquote>

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