I feel like, on paper at least, they've mitigated the issue for players with similar feelings to you by also offering casters who have per-encounter abilities. You could lower the difficulty and form a party of mainly Chanters and Chipers, not sure if that appeals to you though.

Personally I like the per-rest system simply because most other RPGs use either cooldown or mana; it's nice just to have a different system on occasion.

I've seen some more creative solutions in recent years.

Confusingly, one of them is named Path of Exile (PoE, oh dear.) This Diablo clone has one of the coolest potion systems I've seen in a long time - essentially, you carry *flasks* that magically refill as you score minion kills. It's a highly effective gating mechanism. For short bosses alone in a room, you essentially have one full belt to work with, no ifs ands or buts. But you don't shoot yourself in the wallet every time you use them in combat, either. Considering how badly these are done in Torchlight and the like, this is a big relief. Potions gated by cooldowns are also a big mess - hello, MMO hotbar! Scroll for days!

In Pillars, the Monk system looks promising, but I'm a latecomer and can't speak at length about the effectiveness of the implementation.

i agree more with the OP than with the replies. I would feel a lot better about "per rest" if it didn't become a game of "guess how many encounters this area has" and/or backtracking. If backtracking is too reliable, then you might as well just give spells unlimited use and have the game simulate longer loading times to compensate, and it's all the same. Not that anyone has ever proposed "your next load screen takes 15 seconds longer per spell" as a resource system in complete seriousness, but when that's the end result, there is a problem.

The only way I see per-rest or per-area restrictions working is with highly accurate scouting, which might go against the role-playing grain. If you had a list that said how many there were of this that and the other you'll be fighting, then you wouldn't end up hoarding half your spells and never getting to use them.

The place where I think per-rest restrictions works really well is in Rogue-likes. If you have to keep moving to avoid starving to death, then every spell cast is a tough choice about managing multiple resources, and so everything is in the same boat; this is a setting where consumables can easily be balanced, because you can't farm them for days, either. This doesn't merge too well with open-world campaigns, though, at least not unless a lot of dungeons are sort of big and have resting disabled.

Overall, I think per-rest doesn't party well with being able to take four rests with you in a backpack wherever you go and not ever knowing how big an area is.

It really is hard to keep these short, wow.

Eh, it does tend to come down to this point, doesn't it? Thing is, per rest mechanics in Pillars are designed in such a way that you should attempt to tackle every encounter as efficiently as possible as opposed to planning ahead for encounters you don't know are there. It's not about planning ahead, it's about using as little as possible for every single encounter.

That's sort of how a rogue-like works. This game would be a lot closer to that if there were no inns and you weren't allowed to purchase camping supplies.

Well my mage throws his 2 free aoe dingleberries and just plinks away with his wand for the duration of most fights while my cipher can get at least 1 of their equally- if not more powerful spells per encounter off and can actually hit things with their weapon when not spellcasting.
Guess which one of the 2 is more useful.

I kind of wish they would heavily limit spell charges (1-2, not 2-4) but make them all per-encounter based and have per-rest charges on class-exclusive items only so the item slots are actually worth a damn for backline casters.

Hey, the per-rest guys get Tier 1 spells per-encounter at level 9! That'll be in no time! *cries*

And then that level 3 priest joins. I put him on auto with "per-rest" unchecked, but then when something crazy happens, I hop over to him, and... Oh god, he literally has 16 spells! They get all of the spells because they're holy! Gods love them, so they don't have to study! But as a player, I'm not ready to read this much! I just want to kill these two phantoms and go back to Drunky McFirestick being useless again!

I'm kind of liking Sorcerer: The Crossbow Rework as my main character, though. Ciphers forever. Probably screwed up the spell choices some, but oh well. (Friendly fire is the devil. And it's so hard to use death lazer...)

For wizards, I just try to remind myself to go crazy if my health bars are hitting 50-60%. Or if I have to reload, then one or two spells at the start of the fight might be a very good idea...

p.s. - I will continue to be horrified forever by having to think of cantrips as "dingleberries". Thanks, Obama.

I kinda agree that this "per rest" mechanism are rather obsolete - it was the simplest way to limit spell effectiveness in PnP games, but now in CRPG why not use some "mana bar" that refills at some pace to get the same results, without the tediousness and inevitable abuse of the per rest mechanism ?