[kmonster]

In World of Xeen you cannot obtain thievery skill at all, even if you buy all talents in Shangri-La. (How did you manage to get through the game ?)

In MM3 you can buy the thieving talent in the halls of insanity, but it takes a long time to get there.
Unspoiled first time players (I guess the movies are directed towards them) won't feel good if they don't get their quest rewards because they cannot open the chests they find and will probably give up the game before they get their thieving ability.

I also differ about for the long haul more casters being beneficial for the end game.
Many spell points for casters are not neccessary, since there a lots of locations where you can refresh your spellpoints, you can cast your buffing spells there and get to the location you want to clear with spells like teleport and Lloyd's beacon.
During the game you'll find lots of items with casting ability, once you have found a refresh item you can use them at will to cast high and low level spells like dragon breath, beacon or shield without any costs.
In MM3 there are only 3 kinds of monsters which are immune to physical damage, ghosts, firwalkers and terminators (not sure about their names).
The first are painful but low level and don't have many HP, the second won't be able to hurt you anyway because of "protection from elements" and when you meet the third you'll have enough spellcasting items so that only the user level counts, thieves are even one level higher than mages.
Spells also cost gems which can be used for more useful things like refreshing the crystals in the spider cave which grant stat improvements.
When I tested my high level barbarian in the arena against the strongest monster in the game, a dragonking(?) he did about 5700 damage (the knight about 4300) to his 10,000 HP, spells aren't that effective.
In WoX this is similar, you don't get so many magic items, but you also have less magic-immune monsters.
In another forum I recently read from someone who just swept through the whole WoX game with 3 barbarians, 1 ninja and human archer+paladin in just a few hours while the ones having trouble are usually those playing a caster-heavy party without barbarian.