As revealed in this thread magic items are limited in how often you can use them.
There is a concept called "Resonance Score", it is Level + CHA. Whenever you activate magic items or drink potions, you use up your resonance. Once it at 0, you have to start making checks to use items/drink potions. If you fail the check causing the use of the magic item to fail, and if you fumble it, you are cut of from magic items for the rest of the day. Potions no longer do anything.
I have to say my immediate reaction was "ugh. More 4th ed." But upon further reflection I think I like it. It makes CHA more important. If dwarves still have a negative to charisma it means they'll use less magic items. It means wizards can't overcome daily spell limitations with excessive scrolls. Overall I think it's good.
I am highly concerned about HP though. If enemies also have more HP battles are quite possibly going to drag. PCs will be imcentivise to mitigate damage as much as possible. Which means they will deal less damage which means monsters (if they have more HP) will last longer. This is bad. If monster UP remains the same (or lessens), it could result in a much more tactical game with HP moving to a daily resource again.
I am highly concerned about HP though. If enemies also have more HP battles are quite possibly going to drag. PCs will be imcentivise to mitigate damage as much as possible. Which means they will deal less damage which means monsters (if they have more HP) will last longer. This is bad. If monster UP remains the same (or lessens), it could result in a much more tactical game with HP moving to a daily resource again.
How is any of this bad? D&D variants are a resource management game at their heart, and HP is just another resource. 3.5 era games short circuited this with endless fonts of CLW wands, but that doesn't mean that a game where you have to worry about HP management along with spell slot management and damage output isn't at least as fun, if not more fun, than the same game where you have essentially endless healing whenever you're out of combat.
Reread what I said? I agree with you. Longer encounter = bad. Same length or quicker encounters = good.
Magic items and healing get involved because reduced damage output means monsters survive longer which means longer combat. Limited healing imcentivises focusing on defense instead of offense. Monsters having less HP counteracts that problem.
Design Manager
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Just going off the things that have been revealed about action economy so far, damage pacing shouldn't be an issue. For example, based on what's been discussed up to this point, a fighter who needs to move should only lose one out of three attacks, and it's the one with the biggest penalty. That's already a huge improvement over the current edition where moving causes you to lose all of your extra attacks, so general damage output should be up in roughly the same amount as the increase in hit points (assuming that increase applies to monsters in roughly the same way it applies to players), with the biggest difference being that at low levels its less likely for a character to get dropped by a single lucky hit, and at higher levels you're less likely to have rocket tag syndrome where moving first decides the entire encounter (though that's also a factor of things like SoL/SoS spells and effects, which haven't really been discussed yet).
And going off this tidbit from the podcast, you've got additional damage die scaling happening off of your enhancement bonuses, which should roughly account for the 4th iterative that full BAB classes appear to be losing between current edition and 2E.