I think everyone's resting cadence will be highly variable as it greatly depends on party composition, playstyle and experience with this sort of game and difficulty setting.
I'm part way through Act 3 with a completionist approach, on balanced difficulty and my rest cadence is every 2-4 encounters on average, when I've run out of short rests. I take a short rest after every encounter and I can take 3 short rests per long rest due to playing a multiclass college of lore bard/divination wizard which gains the Bard 2 class feature, Song of rest. I tend to have 2-3 casters in the party at a time, most commonly 2, a cleric and my PC. For a few of the more major fights in the game, I took a long rest dedicated to the encounter.
I've only encountered one situation where resting caused a notable problem, in a certain Underdark area in Act 1, due to the game poorly communicating a restriction. You're allowed to rest at most once in that area, otherwise quests fail but it treats 'camp visit without resting' the same as 'long rest' so I squandered my one allowed rest without realizing it. Other than that, my cadence hasn't caused any discernable story/quest issues so far.
There are some other areas where the minimap turns red and you're not allowed to rest. These areas theoretically require more judicious use of your resources but I've found they fit into one of the following categories:
1. there's only a single encounter in them
2. or you can exit the area between encounters and take a long rest
3. or Larian has provided another mechanism to give the equivalent of a long rest in that area
Some notes on my playstyle, which qualifies my cadence:
1. I pick up heaps of junk and sell it so I always have lots of coin and camp supplies.
2. Apart from very early in the game, I don't prepare/use any healing spells. Healing potions are plentiful and cheap. I buy up additional potions from vendors and the vendors regularly restock. IMHO, using a spell slot to cast a healing spell is a waste, when it could be better spent on crowd control or buffing your party. Chances are any healing you've gained from the spell will be negated in the next turn vs debuffing the enemy to reduce their damage output or conversely buffing your party to increase your damage output and relying on party members healing themselves.
3. I tend to favor crowd control slot expending spells over damage dealing ones, although some spells do both. As such, in most encounters, the actions of my spell casters tend to alternate between slot expending crowd control spells and either damage dealing cantrips or debuffing cantrips like vicious mockery, albeit later in the game, since there are more spell slots, I can afford to be a bit more liberal with slotted spells.
4. The rarer situations I use damage dealing slotted spells tend to be a) there's a crowd of enemies that are just asking for a fireball or b) there's 1 or more tough or hard to hit opponents that's each just begging to be magic missiled or else hit with a high damage dealing spell. Often times but not always, the tough opponents are resistant to any possible debuff spell I might have.
5. There are some spells that can be repeatedly used without additional slot expenditure, like a Cleric's moonbeam and a Druid's call lightning. They can be a great way of getting more mileage out of your spell slots, as long as you can maintain concentration, either by being hard to hit or else via feats like war caster, or both, or simply moving your caster well out of reach of attackers.
6. Other spells like a Druid's Spike growth, a Warlock's Hunger of Hadar or a Wizard's Cloudkill last many turns and can do a fair amount of damage if you can keep opponents within those regions, for example by using spells and/or abilities to push enemies back into them, or even putting multiple areas next to each other.
7. Even though my PC is otherwise squishy, with only 48HP at character level 10, the Bard part gave me light armor proficiency which I upgraded to medium armor via a feat. So with a good piece of armor, which I purchased rather than found, a shield and a couple of magic items, their AC is 21 IIRC, which is pretty hard to hit. Furthermore, Bardic inspiration and Portent allow nuking a number of attacks without having to expend spell slots on defenses like mirror image or blur and bardic inspiration refreshes from short rests after Bard 5. Portent will also refresh from short rests after Wizard 6. Tacking on the False life spell cast at level 4 gives my PC an additional 22 temp hit points. The cleric and druid also have similarly high AC.
8. I've lately used Counterspell for a couple of encounters. It's expensive, as it uses spell slots like there's no tomorrow but when dealing with a tough spell caster or a bunch of them, it's very enjoyable watching the enemy's fireball or lightning bolt spell fizzle into nothing. Using Counterspell inherently meant my average encounter per rest metric was worse for these encounters but I deemed them worthy of the sacrifice.
9. I've only very rarely used scrolls and for potions, I've only used healing, antidote and invisibility. So I have heaps of scrolls and potions. If I'd been more liberal in usage, I could potentially rest less often.
10. You can also potentially extend the number of encounters per long rest by swapping out characters at camp, although of course that won't help if your PC is exhausted. I think I've done this 1 or 2 times during my playthrough.
Anyway, that ended up longer than intended. Thanks if you read this far :)
Post edited August 26, 2023 by twistedpony
