See, people keep saying this, and initially I myself bought into it, but now that I have had the chance to actually play 5e myself, through a lot of Solasta but also a lot of virtual-TT play of 5e, I strongly disagree with this. At a minimum you MUST have a dedicated healer with lots of healing or else you stand to have most if not all of your (small 4-person) party go down during a battle. And rests don't help with respect to keeping your party alive DURING a battle.
Solasta is a bit different in that it's a video game, so I expect encounters to be more deadly because failure means reloading instead of permanent loss of character. So having more significant healing can help if you want to reload very infrequently, but imo all parties still do fairly well if you're willing to reload maybe once every ~5 encounters.
In my tabletop 5e experience, I've played in/DM'd for plenty of different 4-person parties with very few character deaths across the campaigns. Of recent 4-player Campaigns (level 1 to at least 6), there's been only 1 death, and we're usually able to tackle all out-of-combat encounters just fine:
- Fighter Druid Artificer Rogue - level 3 to level 11
- Paladin Rogue Bard Warlock - 1 to level 11
- Barbarian Ranger Bard Monk (ranger died at level ~6)
- Barbarian Monk Bard Sorcerer - level 6 to level 14
- Fighter Cleric Monk Sorcerer - 1 to level 6
- Barbarian Rogue Bard Warlock - 1 to level 6
These parties are pretty diverse. I suppose all parties have either a rogue or bard, and then either a Fighter or Barbarian or Paladin. I'll agree that a healer of some sort is necessary. But that healer can be any of: Cleric, Bard, Druid, Paladin, which still allows for a lot of flexibility.
All that said, I can't deny your tabletop experience, so not really sure where that leaves us. Maybe I'm playing in less deadly campaigns. Are you playing in campaigns where enemies attack downed party members? If so, then yes pre-emptive healing is much more important.
