[AdmiralAsshat]

The director's cut provided non-combat solutions to some of the boss fights. But at launch, yeah, those were a huge miss if you had optimized stealth or hacking skills. It felt like a huge slap in the face to anyone that managed to bypass the boss fights in the original Deus Ex by finding the killswitch words.

Penny Arcade captured the sentiment at the time pretty well:

https://arewenewatthis.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/deus-ex1....

(Sorry this is not officially from their site--their archive search system is terrible)

[ThrowawayR2]

In my opinion, there wasn't really an option other than to optimize for a stealthy gameplay style in DX:HR since ammunition was ridiculously scarce. (Intentionally so: https://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2011/08/17/why-i...) There is rarely the opportunity for a stand-up gunfight, very much unlike the original Deus Ex, to break up the monotony.

[AdmiralAsshat]

The ammo problem wasn't much of an issue for me, as I went for a strictly non-lethal playthrough (for which I was annoyingly denied the achievement, as one of the guards I tranq'd immediately fell unconscious...off a roof).

The unavoidable boss-fights were certainly something of a shock at the time.

[djur]

Yeah, the main problem is that HR encourages much more intense character specialization than the original game. The latter half of Deus Ex has a lot of situations where you're expected to fight (although you can generally cheese your way through, run past enemies, etc.) but there's a limit to how much you can overinvest in non-combat skills, and the inventory is spacious enough that you can afford to tote around heavy weaponry to get through tough spots (any character can effectively use mines/grenades and they take up very little space).