Being able to kite more easily is a good thing in my opinion. Makes things more flexible. Want to skip the 'trash' mobs and just do impossible mobs on the harder islands like me? Yup.
I like the flexibility of being able to add-replace companions. It was very frustrating to be forced to do things in a very rigid order.
e.g. I could never get back Jimmy, but he was super useful early on to give me more xp due to his slots, but I really want Moldok for orc build.
Or did I want the sharpshooter companion? I can't change my mind though, one build for the entire game!
Frankly, that sort of sucked and on top of that once you got some of the combinations, you didn't have a lot of enemy units left to use them on.
If they didn't want things "broken" they really really shouldn't have released the rune mage the way it was.
Honestly, the amount of buffs they gave us elsewhere, I think the game is more fun.
Back in Armored Princess, the most damage I could do in a single stack attack (not ball of lightning) was close to 34K.
I'm going to bust that limit by quite a bit in the end and much sooner, when I can actually enjoy using / doing it.
I predict the game will have very very very fast runs possible now and without requiring an INSANE amount of luck and scanning for the 'right' items to drop in the right areas without insane kiting (Hey I was a pretty good kiter, but lets face it, it seemed really dumb but necessary
)