Just curious on other people's opinion on this. Unless I really focus on not using them, it feels like the game is literally just saving up enough gold to afford Lloyd's Beacon, and you've instantly won the game after this.

In MM6, by far my favourite of the three, it's a far bigger problem, since you don't need any particular expertise to be able to use Grandmaster Water magic, other than the mana pool to cast it. MM7 and 8 at least require Grandmastery, and MM7 in particular doesn't even let you get Town Portal until you've arrived at Nighon.

But once you get it, as we all know, you can't really die, or run out of resources, or have any problem whatsoever with any remaining content in the game. Other than, I guess, the Hive in MM6, where at least it resets if you teleport out.

It just becomes "burn all your mana (or health with a Melee team), LB back to the cheapest Temple, LB back and continue. It takes a few minutes to clear all of Dragonsand or Land of the Giants etc.

Does anyone refuse to use them for the sake of a challenge? Or doesn't really bother most people?

I haven't actually played these games, but when it comes to MM2-MM5, I feel that the ability to rest anywhere for a full restore makes this issue rather irrelevant. You can use all of your SP and then rest to get it all back instantly.

It doesn't even start to feel "cheap" until you set the beacons at fountains, where you can get major bonuses to stats (like MM3's +20 level fountain that can be reached early) that last until the next morning.

On the other hand, I feel that Llloyd's Beacon and Town Portal (and MM2's Fly) are very nice quality of life features, significantly reducing the need to travel the same paths over and over. (You missed the closing ".)

How is that different from "burn all your mana (or health with a Melee team), rest, and continue?

After I won the game several times, I got to the point that I would challenge myself to get to Water Master as fast as possible. Then, other than a few Insta Kill Monsters or Darkmoor, the game starts feeling easy.

I don't have a lot of criticism for the mm games but I feel like beacon and fly were a mistake

Well, both of those spells go back to the very first 2 games. In the context of those games, they were a total life saver. In M&M 1, the overworld was very much just like another dungeon in-and-of itself, and the fly spell made early travel to necessary areas a lot more tolerable. Keeping in mind that this was a game that had no auto map. You had to do it all by hand on graph paper. Fly is the game's version of a fast travel mode. Even if you get horribly lost (easy to do) you can always fly back to a familiar location. In M&M 2, Lloyd's Beacon likewise made travel across the very large map a lot more palatable.

The later games kept in the tradition of those two spells, and you could argue whether they became out of balance or not, but they have always been a big part of the M&M experience.

Don't have a problem with MMVII. But MMVI, I have gotten Water Mater Level 12 by mid March. If you have two elemental casters. One can do Lloyd's Beacon at a very low level. The Level 12 Arch can hit Town Portal anywhere and anytime, and then jump back to the site with the lower level caster. Too easy.

I mean I'm not oldschool enough to have played the mm games before the 6th but for the newer games it just feels like the game kinda ends once you unlock high magic, with might parties the game continues to feel challenging but with magic it just ends at the point you start mastering / gming your casters.

It's definitely *not* the case in MM3-MM5. From a damage standpoint, for example, magic does not scale as well as physical attacks. For example:
* Implosion does 1000 damage, while Dancing Sword (strongest scaling spell) does 6-14 per level. This is assuming the enemies don't save against the spell and take half damage or less. (Star Burst, the strongest spell that isn't limited to hitting just one square, is only 500 damage.)
* A Knight starts with one attack and gets an extra attack every 5 levels.
* The spell "Holy Bonus" adds the caster's level to the damage done by each attack, and it affects the whole party (in Xeen, MM3's version affects only one character), and is included in Day of Protection (again, not in MM3 which lacks that spell). Note that this spell can be cast from an item, and the Recharge Item spell can give it extra charges without any risk (as far as I can tell) or weakening of the item.
* MM4 has a weapon that ignores resistance entirely, and it can be carried into MM5.

So, what we see is this:
* At level 50, a Knight deals 11 * 50 = 550 damage from the Holy Bonus effect alone; that's ignoring the base damage of the weapon or the +50 (IIRC) bonus per hit that using obsidian gives you for damage.
* At level 100 (which is realistically reachable, especially with a certain fountain's help), that Knight deals 21 * 100 = 2100 damage from the Holy Bonus damage alone. As you can see, this is way beyond what you can do with magic,
* If you give your Knight a Day of Protection item and use all the permanent level bonuses on them, the damage dealt by physical attacks is even greater, and would by higher than the damage a Sorcerer would do with magic if given those bonuses.
* A level 100 Sorcerer gets only 13 physical attacks; that's still 13 * 100 = 1300 damage from physical attacks. Why bother with offensive magic when physical attacks will out-damage it? (Keep in mind: this is on a *Sorcerer*, a pure mage class; when pure offensive mages do more damage with physical attacks than with spells in the most common case, you know the game's balance is off.)

So no, magic doesn't dominate in the earlier games; quite the opposite, actually.

(MM2 feels a bit more balanced in this regard, mainly because Holy Bonus is weaker and scaling spells get stronger, but it still doesn't feel like magic would dominate the late game, unless you're keeping your level low (~20) to avoid having to face huge groups of enemies and are using spells like Implosion.)

I use town portal to go back to town and all my Lloyds Beacons slots end up being for different maps that dont have Town Portal. I dont feel guilty at all, the game would be an aboslute slog without them, for me at least.

I'm too stingy to pay temples for healing, training is expensive enough.