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There has been plenty of whining due to not sticking to the number 7 which has been arbitrarily chosen because it is the midpoint between 2 and 12, that was why I mentioned it. I did not expect you to realistically use it as an argument, I mentioned it because I wanted you to actually define something useful so that a debate can actually productively occur.



The maximum HP roll for a Goblin is 12. So if I double this, a Goblin with 24 or more HP constitutes as bloated? There are a sum total of 4 Goblins in the EA which has more than 24 HP and all of them are bosses, which are very clearly designed to be a boss encounter and they each have custom gear. I could go on and on about this, but defining a fixed amount of HP as being bloated is actually a meaningless metric, because an appropriate amount of HP depends on the party itself. If you have a level 20 party and for some reason you want to run a Goblin against them, you could come up with a plot where there is some archmage who magically enchanted a Goblin and made it far more dangerous than its ordinary brethren. The point being, given the circumstances, a foe will or will not feel bloated relative to the party. You do however, give another useful metric further down of 2-3 turns, which I will use as a definition, because its actually a meaningful tool of measurement and can be used as a gauge independent of party level.



Debates are done based on definitions, unless you define HP bloat to mean something, it is a vague and meaningless term and there is no point to arguing over it. How much HP is too much? For now, I will take your definition of a "non bloated" encounter to be 2-3 turns, although I could also use, "double the MM" as your definition but since very few enemies have actually got more than double the MM's stats and all of those who do have justifiable reasons for being that way, I see it as not much of an argument to begin with.



I gave numbers further up in that screenshot. I even gave numbers before that, showing how on average Goblins will die in a single hit, but ok, let me make it easy for you, since apparently connecting the dots is a little bit challenging for you. In that screenshot above there are 16 Goblins with a total HP of 188 and an average HP of 11.75 (which is below the maximum roll of 12 for a Goblin). All of them have 12 AC. Shatter does 3d8 damage. If you are looking at probability, there is a 68.35% chance that shatter will roll for 12 or higher. Most of the Goblins in that screenshot however, have 10 HP. If you adjust for that, it is an 83.59% chance of landing for 10 or higher. From experience, these Goblins have a habit of climbing up that structure on the left, clustering there and firing arrows down on your party. You can realistically expect to have quite a few Goblins within the AoE, so at minimum you can expect it to hit lets say 4 Goblins and at the very least 1 of them will die, while the rest will be injured.

Then lets look at the rest of the party members. Well, in that screenshot above, you have a Fighter wielding a greatsword, which, after accounting for all modifiers, deals 2d6+5 damage excluding superiority die as well as the dipping mechanic. 12 HP goblins, on hit die 58.33% of the time. Against the 10 HP Goblins, 83.33% of the time. I could go on with examples for the rogue and priest, but you get the idea. You can reasonably expect 4-5 enemies to die every single round in that example above, if you account for finishing off partially wounded enemies due to enemies which were not killed but wounded by shatter. Well, what about parties that don't have a wizard or a warlock who has shatter? Well, your warrior may have cleave, but you might also be playing say for example a PC light cleric and have access to tools like the light domain channel divinity power which has a very big AoE and could realistically hit 10 or so of those Goblins for over 2d10 damage.

The point being, there are lots of tools, in this specific example, which make this encounter not only manageable without resorting to things like dip or the additional advantage rules, but actually rather easy. If you ignore every single 1 of Larian's extra rules, you can end it within 4-5 turns. But wait, you might argue, this falls outside of the expected 2-3 turns! Well the thing is, unless you run through the entire camp like I did, you will only be engaging 7-8 of them at a time. This significantly lowers that "4-5" and basically cuts the encounter in half. Tell me, if a player at your table went charging into a war camp of enemies and made a big mess of himself, pulling them all onto the party at once, would you not be fine with this being either a party wipe, or an encounter that extends beyond your, "2-3 turns?"

But now, instead of looking at the resolution of the encounter, let us look at the encounter itself and see what we can conclude about it. Does it take overly long to resolve? In terms of time, because there are so many combatants moving, it does have the potential to take a long time to resolve. This is not because the player will spend much time actually doing anything, but because an option does not exist to skip the movement animations of combatants, which is something which should clearly be implemented. In terms of actual combat however? If you define an encounter as, "something which should take 2-3 actions on the part of each combatant to resolve," then this can easily fall within that. Especially if you don't go completely mad like I did and attack every single goblin at once.

Obviously however, the number of turns an encounter takes is dependent on the party, a more experienced party can end an encounter much quicker than a less experienced party. Larian is "GMing" for 100's of thousands of different party types at once and they cannot customize the experience to all of them at the same time, but they can (and probably will) offer different difficulty tiers, to somewhat allow players to customize the difficulty to their liking. The question is, can these encounters (without resorting to the "rules" like dip) be ended within your expected timeframe of 2-3 turns and the answer to that question is a definite yes.