Quote Originally Posted by Misterwhisper View Post
That is one of the other main issues, there are no extended fights like old editions.

I never made it to level 20 but I have made it to 16 once and 17 once.

No fight lasted more than 4 rounds. None.
I have never even heard of a combat in other groups go past 6.
Most of the time of a fight goes past 4 it is because everyone is stuck in darkness or fog or something and people are doing nothing most of the time.

Heck in the level 16 capped game where I played a melee rogue, I didn’t even bother rolling initiative after level 11 because I knew that nothing I was going to do in actual combat mattered.

We had:
An evoker wizard one level fighter
A life cleric
A bear totem barbarian with PAM
A vengeance paladin one level hexblade and PAM
A Lore Bard
And
Me as a melee centered rogue swashbuckler who used a custom made 2 handed reach finesse weapon.

It was very much the 10 min adventuring day, so I just went around and scoped places for hidden rooms and things while everyone else handled the fighting.
Unfortunately your experience reflects mine as well, at high levels the way casters just absolutely shut down encounters before they even begin can be pretty gross. The DM's solution to this way to make enemy saves ridiculously high and giving way too many creatures legendary resistances (instead of putting in more encounters in one adventuring cycle...) and casters almost immediately became the other extreme, very weak. This just isnt the way the game was designed.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the first thing any DM should do to remedy this is to not make it so easy to take a long rest, either by danger, time pressure or making the requirements for actually completing one higher (must be done in safety and comfort, or only in certain designated "safe spots" in the map). Casters should be exhausting their spell slots by the end of a long rest, not just resting to get their 6+ slots back.

Of course this doesn't fix the entire problem, but its the very first thing anyone can do to start making it less of one.