Originally Posted by Niara
Originally Posted by SorcererVictor
And monsters grow up on hp per CR in a much exponentially way. High level encounters on 5e can take dozens of rounds.

Many DM's also complain that is hard to challenge a party on higher levels. Because nothing is a threat to theyr near infinite hp pool. I love high level but for 5e, we should focus more on mid level.

I'm curious where you're getting this idea from...

A mid to high level fighter can easily put out upwards of 80 damage a round without burning any resources; a 6th level disintegrate does an average of 70 damage.

Compared to this, even demon princes and deities don't really get much above 300 hit points; There are literally 7 sub-CR20 creatures with more than 300 hit points, and most of them are end-of-module bosses.

Even if you push the bracket as far as it will go, with the most recent high cr books, there are only 14 creatures, ranging from CR 22-28 that break 400Hp, and again, they are almost all end-of-module major bosses.

A party of 4 that are at a level to challenge such creatures without getting chunked in seconds are going to have damage outputs that might see them doing ~200 damage a round as a group, or more.

None of these battles will EVER take more than three or four rounds at most, one way or the other.

Edi: I'll add to that, your wizard with 14Con will average about 110Hp at level 20; That's barely more than one round of damage for most of the above-mentioned creatures, not including legendary actions/reactions - grab a stock standard ancient Blue at that tier; its breath weapon deals average 88 damage. A Marut deals 120 damage to a single target a turn if it wants.

High tier battles are fast and brutal in 5e, the exact opposite of slow and drawn out.
Niara hit the nail on the head; none of what SorcererVictor is saying sounds at all like 5e. It's very rare for a 5e battle to last more than 3-4 rounds. Recently, I had one very long battle that lasted about 6 rounds; we killed a god.

The only complaints I've heard from DMs about having trouble challenging players have been in games where players get to rest too often, so they come into every battle fresh with full health and all of their spell slots. If you actually make players ration their resources over the course of a full day's worth of activities (with urgency in the story so they can't get a full night's rest 2-3 times a day), challenging them isn't an issue and suddenly players have to make interesting decisions about which abilities are worth using rather than reaching for the big guns in every fight.