Quote Originally Posted by Slipjig View Post
Well... yes? Some party compositions are simply better than others. And if every player builds their character in a vacuum you can end up with an ineffective party. Because it's 5e, they'll probably still be okay at most tables (Skrum's being an obvious exception), but they'll underperform vs. a party that was designed/recruited to complement each other.
The point is that you can’t assume any particular ability available to the party when designing monsters for a table-agnostic design space like the Monster Manual.

The inflation of save DCs on monsters in excess of proficient saves at high stats is not justified by the existence of Paladins.

And whilst I don’t think they did design it that way for that reason (I think they did it because they didn’t think very hard at all about how they’d designed saves) people have brought it up.