I did not say that. I was talking about balance between all classes and the game as a whole. I already laid out that because of the surfaces they HAD to implement healing opportunities in abundance, which atm favors the non-casters heavily. Which in turn is a balance issue. Imagine playing co-op and I play as a Warlock and my buddy is a Champion fighter. So yeah, I am not forced to long rest necessarily, but atm we have only short rest. So after between long rests I have 1 SR to get 4 spells in total. While the fighter has no real need to rest soo often at all. Because his restriction lies in HP, which in turn were heavily buffed by food/potions. So he goes all day no problem, while the warlock is not too great at that point. Without the rebalancing of AC/HP and surface effects the fighter and WL would both maybe do 2 short rests but at some point the fighter is out of hit dice and needs to get a good sleep. And this inner party friction is not only present in Coop, but also in singleplayer. What if I want to use Wyll, because I like him? It is kind of immersion breaking to choose between long resting in the middle of a dungeon or having a PC being useless.
Except they didn't? I am certainly not relying on the abundant healing in my playthrough. I suspect that the healing was implemented more by accident (due to them wanting to add some utility to food) than as a deliberate design decision in order to balance surfaces. The best defense against anything is not getting hit and this game emphasizes that heavily, with many areas having narrow corridors to bottleneck enemies in, or ladders leading to high up areas where its easy to break line of sight. The arenas are designed in a way where there is a very clear, convenient, easy to reach location which would give the player a significant combat advantage and at the same time severely dampen the damage output of enemies, to the point where they land maybe 1 or 2 hits during the entire fight. You don't even need metagame knowledge to see this either. The fight starts, if before you act you take say a minute to pan the camera and inspect the arena, you will notice the area is constructed with sections that provide you with advantages.
In addition to that, I am not really seeing the argument for how these changes favor fighter classes. Its the casters which can easily create surfaces. Its the casters which have lots of long ranged abilities, who need to spend the least amount of time positioning relative to surfaces. As it currently stands, the most effective way to play is to not engage enemies in melee at all, but to snipe them at range with either a bow or cantrips for the most part.
Even if this was the case however, lets be realistic here. Larian is not going to implement penalties for resting, or time restrictions, because it would go down poorly with the majority of people who play the game. Even if we both dislike rest spamming and enjoy playing against the clock, its just not going to happen. The fact of the matter is, the people who want to start every fight on a wizard with a full list of memorized spells are going to be able to do that, so its a moot point regardless.
I see that your perspective is that you want a tactical arena game, but you fail to recognize that this is marketed as an RPG. Its not the main aspect to beat the a game in "some possible way" but also to immerse people in it and having a good roleplaying experience. And the latter thing gets kind of screwed if the balance is butchered in favor of some flashy features that really dont offer very much in decision making. I'd argue that the real ruleset of 5e is giving you much harder tradeoffs and decisions than the current "yolo jump and disengage"-balance. It is much thougher to use your action to save your ass, instead of disengaging, moving and attacking either way.
I mainly play CRPGs, Turn Based Strategy and Real Time Strategy for the same thing, I enjoy tactical combat. All 3 of them offer it, usually in slightly different flavors. Whilst it is the combat is my main interest, I will humor you for a moment and discuss the role playing aspect of it (which I usually ignore, because if I was to judge it I would judge it really harshly). When it comes to stories/narrative, I am somewhat of a simulationist, its important to me that the world is believable, it needs to have verisimilitude. That does not necessarily mean that it needs to follow the laws of physics, but the "rules" of the world need to be internally consistent. The moment I cannot think of a good reason for something to function that way, I am no longer immersed in the world.
In a high magic world where some people can warp reality, it makes no sense for combat to be "balanced," its like asking for a gun to be balanced against a sword. In fact, if you are trying to make a world like Faerun believable, there would be a very big lack of balance. I personally consider D&D to be a particularly weak system in the verisimilitude department, if you start asking the question, "why does this work this way," you very quickly hit against the wall of, "because someone arbitrarily decided it does," where as in a more believable fantasy universe, you could probably think of more than a dozen good reasons for that feature to function in that way. An easy example of this is, in the thousands of years that the world has existed, why hasn't gunpowder become something known and used across the entirety of the realms.
From a narrative perspective, I personally consider balance to be one of the least important factors to a rule system, in some cases downright adversarial to immersion. You just need to take 5 seconds to look at the real world to realize that "balance" is a myth, balance is not something included in a set of rules to make the setting more believable, or to make it better facilitate role playing, balance is included to make the combat more interesting because combat is not interesting when the solution is, "so he pulled the trigger and shot him and the encounter is over," for every single fight. Its sacrificing realism in an effort to create a tactical experience. So if all you care about is the "role playing experience" so to speak, then from my pov balance should be the least of your concerns, because a believable world is not a balanced world.
From a tactics (not roleplaying) perspective however, notice, I didn't disagree that it would be better if combat was balanced, I didn't complain at all about shove being moved from a bonus action to an action or any of those other things that were talked about. In none of those cases are actions being removed, just rebalanced. All I objected to was removing surfaces entirely, because it doesn't matter how you try to spin it, by removing surfaces, you are removing an element from gameplay. I would prefer it if combat had surfaces and was balanced, rather than lacked surfaces and of course, that would mean taking liberties with additional rules in order to achieve that. No ruleset is perfect however, you can bet that in 10 years time there will be a D&D 6th or even 7th edition with updated rules and without trying to modify rules to begin with, you will never end up with a "better system."
See point above. You have so many things to do, there is almost no tradeoff. In ONE round, you maybe have to choose between a potion or a shove, but who cares? I still can use a potion and my Battlemaster shove attack. Trade-off quality beats Trade-off quantity.
In almost no cases do you want to use a health potion during combat, because if that action can be used in any way to shorten the fight, then the act of using the health potion is simply prolonging combat.
