How often should one take a "Long Rest"?

[Dave]

I do my best not to use any abilities that need to be recovered from resting unless I'm in a serious situation and even then they seem to fail often. So I get the impression I might be missing out on some important events pertaining to the camp.

[Hex]

Originally posted by mi7spike:

Originally posted by Mansen:

Let me put it this way. Playing on the normal difficulty on my first playthrough, I had so many camp supplies in my bags, that I literally couldn't pick them up except with my 18 str barbarian.

You can definitely allow yourself a LOT of long rests, provided you are enough of a loot goblin and grab every sausage, lambchop and stale bread you come by (I actually found inventory management of this so frustrating that I just altogether disabled camp supply need for rests and stopped picking up anything to keep it fair)

You know you can send your camp supplies to camp and don't have to carry them at all ?

It's annoying to do them one at a time. Better to just fill your bag then send that bag over and take another bag from a companion since they all start with one and start filling that up when you need weight. You can rest even if they are in the bag in the chest.

[TamTroll]

Personally i always try and get the maximum amount of stuff done between long rests, meaning i only go for it before/after major events, and mostly if i've already burned through all my short rests. For example i visited Auntie Ethal, and then didn't long-rest until i cleared out most of the underdark in act 1.

Biggest downside to this is that i'm in act 2, and the owlbear hasn't joined the camp yet. But there are plenty of scrolls to make up for missing spell slots, and I've never liked the idea of "long rest after every encounter" anyways.

[x_equals_speed]

I tend to rest when everyone in the party needs more than trivial healing (using spells if only one or two people do) and will do both short rests before doing a long rest.

[drz30]

As often as you need to.

[raymond]

Doing all of the primary act 1 area, only made use of one long rest -- then moving into the mountain pass area of act 1 enforced a long rest - which involved a couple of camp-story moments, and crashed leaving camp.
So ... did three long rests to clear out any camp story events before going into the mountain pass long rest, and was able to continue.

[Hex]

Originally posted by raymond:

Doing all of the primary act 1 area, only made use of one long rest -- then moving into the mountain pass area of act 1 enforced a long rest - which involved a couple of camp-story moments, and crashed leaving camp.
So ... did three long rests to clear out any camp story events before going into the mountain pass long rest, and was able to continue.

By playing like that you lose a huge amount of dialogue scenes.

[AsianGirlLover]

Treat most fights as the perfect excuse to go supernova and unleash your strongest abilities. You’ll have tons of camp supplies throughout the entire game and never find yourself lacking - especially once you master pickpocketing and gold becomes a practically infinite resource.

Most importantly, by sleeping more you’ll miss less content that would otherwise be skipped as you progress the story.

[Mokona]

One should never sleep. If you let your mind relax the tadpole will take over.

[raymond]

Originally posted by Hex:

Originally posted by raymond:

Doing all of the primary act 1 area, only made use of one long rest -- then moving into the mountain pass area of act 1 enforced a long rest - which involved a couple of camp-story moments, and crashed leaving camp.
So ... did three long rests to clear out any camp story events before going into the mountain pass long rest, and was able to continue.

By playing like that you lose a huge amount of dialogue scenes.

As I understand is the case - similarly my killing a pale looking figure near the crash site reduces some dialogue options.

I think the enforced long rests between areas was because there were bonuses you could pick up that aren't meant to be carried into other areas.

[Trolleur_Durden]

As opposed to other games with various time constraints, here you will actually be penalized if you don't rest often enough, because you will delay or even miss a lot of campfire interactions. There are however a couple of cases where you should hurry, namely saving a certain drow in the Underdark and breaking a certain councilor from jail before execution, but those are exceptions to the rule.

Pathfinder WotR gave me the very bad habit of delaying rest as much as possible in order to avoid the buffing fiesta that comes in the morning, and it has definitely negatively affected my first playthrough. I even had a case where my Durge character litteraly fell inconscious all of a sudden so that I could have a dream interaction with Sceleritas, because I had delayed rest for way too long at that point.

So my current approach to resting is: spamming abilities every fight, short rest after every fight, long rest if there's no more short rests available. And it has made my game experience much more satisfactory.

[⇧⇨⇩⇩⇩]

Originally posted by Dave:

I do my best not to use any abilities that need to be recovered from resting unless I'm in a serious situation and even then they seem to fail often. So I get the impression I might be missing out on some important events pertaining to the camp.

That depends a lot in how good you are at combat, and how good you are at stealing or itherwise aquiering usefull consumables.
Even two people with the exact set of characters with the exact same levels and point distribution could get drastically different outcomed judt based on how they go about scouting/combat.

[Zaris]

From my experience on tactician playthrough: Just rest after every major fight, there aren't many trash fights anyway in this game and you can buy / steal rations easily with a pickpocketing in your group.

You should only follow the following pattern: Start full rested and go to some new location, explore it completely then long rest and then discover the next location and do everything.

The reason is Larian scripted some areas with events which auto complete if you discover them and long rest before finishing the event. There aren't many luckily:

- Waukeens rest fire rescue event
- Tiefling and sirens at druid grove beach
- Grimforge (all dwarfs, gnomes will vanish and Nere is dead if you long rest 2 times before freeing him, one rest is ok -> do the rescue first and then the side monster fights)
- Roland near city ruins after he left to search for his siblings, if you go near him he starts a fight with monsters and dies if you don't join asap
- lower cities maybe the assassinations, not sure but could be timed as well

[goobyplz]

I can count on both hands how many long rests I *needed* to take during the entire game. I ended up taking several long rests in a row sometimes because I realized I was missing so many cutscenes from not taking long rests that I started doing it on purpose to move some storylines along. I am gonna do another playthrough, and will be casting more spells and using more short rests to heal instead of what I was doing, intentionally looking to do more long rests. I imagine I might do maybe 20 long rests through the whole game.

[GayBeard]

you should do them relatively often. Its how a lot of companion story progresses. After a major event for example for sure long rest. Even on tactician you willl have an abundacne of supplies - assuming you loot most of them.

[Etragorn]

Originally posted by AsianGirlLover:

Treat most fights as the perfect excuse to go supernova and unleash your strongest abilities. You’ll have tons of camp supplies throughout the entire game and never find yourself lacking - especially once you master pickpocketing and gold becomes a practically infinite resource.

Most importantly, by sleeping more you’ll miss less content that would otherwise be skipped as you progress the story.

I would agree with this. Any decent sized fights, just go all out and use that as an excuse to long rest, unless you have been told about something time specific, then you need to manage your resources so as not to need to rest if you shouldn't