Mana Cost's are out of control

It seems like casters best way to scale damage is via Spell Level, however you wind up having to pay ludicrous amounts of Mana for a single cost of spells.

Its not just casters that have this problem, but bow skills and xbow skills have it, just not as bad because they aren't scaling levels of skills as aggressively, and with crossbows you get quite a few shots before you have to reload.

My 2nd feedback is that I wish more skills were viable to use in the lategame. I understand that not every skill has to be doing crazy damage, but for instance "Eye of Winter" does genuinely 0 damage late game, even with the best 5 link support gems and quality.

TLDR: Mana costs scale so high they actually become LESS mana efficient per damage dealt.

Some skills do literally 0 damage late game, they dont move healthbars at all.

Like it or not, "the vision" wants spells to rely on combos and setup to be able to do damage. The spells that don't need such work will end up nerfed.

As for Eye of Winter, I wouldn't really say it does zero damage endgame, but what is true is that it is highly dependent on getting its elemental bonuses. If you are talking about 5 support gemes, then you are around a level where you could be finding ways to give it all 3 elements to boost it. Another thing about Eye of Winter is that the gems you need to give it damage are unintutive. Pierce and Rikochet are more important than damage gems, because they allow it to hit more targets.

Nevertheless, it's definitely way too much work extract enough juice from this spell, specially when compared to other ones. But that's solvable by getting improvements to it. I think the change that made "orb" skills also give it the bonus was a really good step forward. But honestly, what this spell really needs is to stop being artificially-limited in the ways to buff its projectiles. The main projectile should be allowed to fork. Scattershot should work for all the needles and not just the ones from the final spiral. Actually, I wish it didn't have that final spiral so that the periodic needles could actually do real job instead of limiting so much on the spiral.

As for mana. Well, it's what it is. I've been noticing that mana is becoming a more important stat than spell damage and + levels. Maybe there are changes to be done in game balance. But I think this is a place where I had to really take advantage of passives. There's a lot of mana regen passives, and I had to sacrifice some nice things in order to focus on them. Also, there's the passive that makes you take damage from mana and the other passive that adds % Damage out of Max Mana. These are pretty useful because they allow you to put more emphasis on Mana modifiers when getting equipement. But I am sure things will keep getting worse. I am actually avoiding to level up my skills even though I have gems availalbe, because the mana costs are pretty dangerous.

Helmet soul core that give -6% mana skill costs is to low value but don't expect from Devs to realize it. Players should beg all time for obvious things.

I'm glad i found items and maximized mana regeneration to 250% before patch 0.2.0. Now market is empty and Valuable rare items don't drop anymore.