Again, tweak the reservation on the skill then. It's not the strongest skill ever to begin with. Keep the multipliers where they are, drop down reservation. It still costs mana/life to cast, so you still need to manage your mana and can't reserve 99% and just fly by with a 20 mana cast of something.
No, I'm saying they're unarguably better than we are. But that they're outliers and not really remotely indicative of the average player and their experience. It's like comparing a bunch of kids enjoying skating at the local skate park to Tony fuckin Hawk. We're not Tony Hawk. Can you "finish" the league in a few days? Absolutely. Do the vast majority of players "finish" the league in a few days? No they fuckin don't.
Again, it's a bad strawman comparison. People have beaten Dark Souls with a fuckin DDR gamepad, that doesn't mean it's reasonable to expect it to be doable for anyone else.
Except that it clearly didn't work out well and obviously could have used some testing given the quick and expansive change that resulted. It still makes mana matter more, which was the goal, it just actually benefitted form like, actual playtesting and players looking at the numbers, instead of those numbers being finalized in the days leading into launch with a, "Meh, this looks fine."