I take long rests intuitively when I want to progress relations between the party. I think it is made poorly as of now, that only one NPC can get an exclamation mark during a single long rest. It pushes you to rest more than you need. You can kinda work around it by wasting resources during every fight and just have to take more long rests, but I kinda like to save my best cards for bosses and tough/epic encounters.
