I’ve been running Curse of Strahd using 2024 rules over the last 6 months, and while it’s still a great adventure, I constantly sense a dissonance between my DMing style and the expectations of the system.
My players in this group are hyper-competent power gamers, which certainly colors my experience, but we’ve also played together for years and have a good sense of each other’s goals and style.
I think the most common thing I feel is that the rules care deeply about combat on a granular level. It’s not just during combat that this comes up, though. Every time the players stop combat, rest, or set out on a quest, there’s a good 5-10 minutes of healing, doling out temp hp, and fiddling with combat-related features. It’s honestly exhausting.
The combats themselves overstay their welcome far more than any previous time I’ve run the adventure (this is my third time running the whole hardcover, and I’ve run the castle portion probably twelve times or more).
I originally set out to run this as a way to test if 5E 2024 could work for me. Figured if any adventure would still be fun, it would be CoS, one of my favorites. Unfortunately, the mismatch of setting and system has kind of spoiled it. I’ll probably give the new rules one more try in a context that’s intended to be more combat-focused, just to see if that changes anything.
Wish I had a more positive take!
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One thing that struck me doing the “class-wise” comparisons was that the bulk of the changes to class features were rate-limited by rests and had referenced initiative extensively. In other words, classes feel like they’ve been tuned to deliver more of a combat focus.
It seems like your experience is that the other Pillars have been moved further to the periphery of the system - as if that was even possible with Social!
You piqued my curiosity about encounters “overstaying their welcome” if only because my intuition is howling that combats ought to run fewer rounds in '24 (or “5+” as I’m going to start trying out, maybe “5++” or “5#” 
), but that each player’s turn is probably going to have more discrete lower-case-a actions because of action economy changes to feats (and Weapon Mastery in particular).
Once upon a time, a friend told me his experience that D&D (being the broad stand-in term for “TTRPG”) players coming to the game from World of Warcraft in particular tend toward combat-optimizing. I suspect that '24 internalized a fair amount of that conditioning to make characters feel more combat-effective (or “active” at least), but hasn’t done much to “Find the Fun” in its combat mechanics.
**FWIW, I have a well-earned reputation for disparaging 5e combat because most of the time it’s just boring and pointless and a foregone conclusion.
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Agree with most of what you’re saying, yeah. In my experience, the time sink comes from making decisions. There are just so many features by tier 2 and it gets worse as you go.
Also, if the DM wants to challenge players, they have to put out more monsters with more hit points, so that bloats the time a lot too. It’s like a weird arms race.
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