Grampy_Bone
Arcane
I agree that 'bypassing combat' is a silly thing to tout. All M&M games are designed for you to systematically exterminate every living thing from top to bottom, and that's how I play them.
One thing people tend to forget is I don't rate this game in a vacuum, I rate it in terms of how I received it when it came out. Going from XEEN to M&M6 was a colossal disappointment. Party size reduced from 6 to 4, classes reduced from 10 to 6, races removed. The skill system doesn't even come close to making up for it. The XEEN games moved and played blazing fast, M&M6 feels like being stuck in mud. That's decline.
I still think the balance is garbage. Most RPGs have a nice feeling of progression throughout the game, but M&M6 plateaus off long before the endgame. Weapon upgrades are pretty linear and don't provide enough damage increase to keep up with mob HP bloat, and neither do skills. By the end of the game you really can't go toe-to-toe with ANY group of monsters, especially when they are spamming one-shot kill effects as rapid as you can attack. I believe they made the endgame enemies so hard to encourage use of the laser guns, which do solve most of the scaling problems. But there is a really long gap between getting the best melee weapons and finding the guns, and it includes some absolutely grueling dungeons. The spells have the same problem, in that most of them don't scale for shit. Healing spells become all but worthless part way through the game, unless you love the tedium of casting heal spells 50 times after every single fight. Yes, fly and meteor shower are great, but they only work outside.
M&M7 fixed all of this mostly with the Grandmaster skill level, which provides the necessary scaling bump to take on the top-tier enemies, usually by "doubling previous bonuses." The fact that they had to double the numbers to bring weapons and spells in line with the enemies alone should prove M&M6 just doesn't provide enough scaling potential for high level combat. That along with better items overall with more damage numbers on high tier items makes the progression curve far smoother and less frustrating than before. It does have the effect of making the guns less awesome at the end, but freeing the player from having to always rely on one weapon type at the endgame regardless of party comp is only a good thing.
M&M6 was a new engine with new systems so its understandable they didn't fully test the math. I suppose in the world of internet dick-waving competitions you can argue it's superior for the higher challenge level alone, but in comparison to the previous games the massive increase in difficulty--mostly through extreme tedium--was quite a shock.
I do agree that M&M7 probably made the skills too restrictive with some skills being all but mandatory despite being available to only a few specific classes. You either need a thief, or if you're going Dark you can get away with a monk, but lacking those two classes means you'll have real problems opening any chests. Most players are familiar with the concept of dumping a party member just for trap disarming and lock picking, but that dates back to wizardry games with the 6-man roster. On a 4-man team it does feel pretty restrictive to have to have a thief. Luckily the M&M7 thief is a combat badass so it's not like you're suffering for it, but it does reduce the overall depth of party choices. I still think this is preferable to every class being pretty much the same in M&M6 with the only meaningful choice being whether you want them to have mage or cleric spells.
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