Well W8 is finished and it was fun, a lot of fun actually, but boy does this game have a few issues.
Putting aside the sluggish combat, discussed above, my biggest gripe are the monsters, especially their level scalling and HP bloat. W6 and W7 handles this so much better. And my second big gripe is the "magic issue" which is somewhat related.
I was always looking forward to bigger and more destructive spells to deal with the trash fights faster but they always disappointed (as many people warned). That's because the monsters always seem to have about 10 times more HP than is your reliable (green range) destructive spell dmg output. By the time you get WMDs like Nuclear Blast or Earthquake, enemies start in the 300 HP range
and have 80+ elemental damage resistance
and many of them cast Elemental Shield. This renders those spells effectively useless. For the same reason the instant death-type spells like Asphyxiation, Death Wish or Quicksand are doubly useless (moreover the 7th level spells like Death Wish come very late in the game, if you don't powerplay, I got mine on the Ascension Peak
)
And as for the disabling magic, most of it is also pointless, when Paralyze or Web is rarely successful and Blind is more annoying than anything since blinded monsters run away. Best magic school by far seems to be Psionics (in W7 it is the worst), at least this one becomes useless only at the very end.
On the other hand some protective spells - Magic Screen, Soul Shield, Elemental Shield and Missile Shield - seems a tad bit overpowered. Combined with high resistances my chars accumulated through leveling monsters could hardly touch me. The last fight was a joke and I was only about level 22. Also, as a side note, after dozens of hours of playing I still have no idea what
exactly spells like Bless, Armorplate and Enchanted Sword actually do.
All this would probably seem a little weird but otherwise fine if I hadn't played the previous Bradley games right beforehand. Those are balanced so much better. There's still
some scalling in W7 but so much more subtle and organic. And monsters aren't so ridiculously spell resistant.
(Also, fuck Gadgeteer next time. Most gadgets come late, there are much fewer of them than music instruments and many are underpowered. The Omnigun can be decent but blinds very often, which is annoying, and the ultimate - and truly awesome - addon comes at lvl 26 which means 25 million XP. Fuck that, next time I take Bard).
Don't get me wrong, W8 is still a great game and great fun, especially compared to...well, almost everything else, but it's not a work of pure genius anymore.