A survey ? But was there a mana-cost-for-skills problem in the first place before your "enhancement"/"moving forward"/"new contents" patch ? Did you do a such specific survey before doing it ? Are you really surprised by people's reactions ? What a masquerade.
IMO, there wasn't any serious mana problem. It's like you modders discovered Diablo II and reinvent the game from scratch, toying with different features at each patch. Here it's as if you would want an explanation about why mana cost for skills exists and what this feature provides as a gaming mechanic, I feel back in 2001 when Blizzard did just that.
There were just a few skills that would have eventually needed a small adjustment, that's all. For example, IMO the multi-shot mana cost was too low, only 2 or something, while in vanilla it scales with the number of arrows which sounds fair, I never understood this change from Soulmancer (it is at least since 1.16). Another one, Blade Fury : oftenly its mana cost felt excessive, it was just annoying, I think they had increased its mana cost for DPS "balance" purpose, a very lame solution. There were probably some other skills here and there, but only minor adjustments were needed if at all. Then in 1.7 you made those huge changes and people complain because it's simply player-unfriendly. I think you just want some people to back you up to play the "roller coaster of unbalancing" again.
I was reading old posts of the forum and I think I understood something I missed about the purpose of all those new patchs : supposedly, the community would want new contents in each patch... But to what purpose, for the sake of change ? And is it even true ? It looked like a wishful thinking statement from some people. But it's obviously also the opinion of the actual gurus.
What many players had noticed is that modders keep doing that roller coaster of unbalancing things in one way, then after feigning a surprise, they "fixe" them in a next patch by re-unbalancing them in the opposite way... You know we know that, right ? You modders did that again and again, a sure easy (and lame) way to make players feel a change ("new content"?) ; Quality (real balancing) doesn't matter, as long as there're new shits it should be popular (?).
For examples, from what I heard melees were useless in early 1.3 before a fixe in ~1.3G, or at one point summoners were super strong and then became shit, or excessively pushing thorns damages on items and next obliterating this feature almost completely, or nerfing so much the meditation's level of the Insight runeword it had become a useless item, or adding %life to Stamina and then making it along with BO to do only a skinny ~11-15% maxed. I think there was the same thing for poison characters (but they're harder to balance). Etc.
Here you created a problem out of nowhere (with no apparent reason) by making mana costs super high for all classes and nerfed leeching (why even keep those 1% ll/ml, why not cleanly remove those item's mods ? They're just visual pollution), and now you ask if mana cost should be bluntly erased... Another roller coaster anyone ? Going from evil numbers to zero, that's a full loop ; I'd expect some more "ungrateful" vomit following the introduction of a such "free" enhancement into this hijacked game's ass : P
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