Help Touchscreen unresponsive?

[Spartahog]

Rooted Galaxy S3 Virgin Mobile with cm-11-20141112-SNAPSHOT-M12-d2lte. I dropped my phone due my pockets not being deep enough and slipped out and landed by its side and bounced and hit its face (touchscreen). Now when I checked to examine it, there were no cracks and the screen looked fine. When I checked to see if it still worked, I swiped and it seemed to respond after repeated swipes. Nighttime came in and wanted to send a message to a friend, as I was typing, the screen just did not respond to my inputs anymore. The physical buttons still work, as well as the menu and back button, just no more touch inputs. Since I was not able to access anything at all, I took the battery out and booted the phone again both normally and to download mode, the touchscreen did not respond so I took the phone apart just to see if the touchscreen connector was loose and put the phone back together, still no luck. I cleaned dalvick cache, formatted to install a new rom, installed the same one again, and rebooted to receive the cyanogenmod welcome setup screen. No luck. It was until yesterday at night that by accident I discovered safe mode and was able to move around the language selection screen and finished setup, but after a few seconds, the touchscreen will not respond. I removed the battery again and entered safe mode again but this time it did not work. Even after duplicating what I did before, the touchscreen did not respond. At first sight it seems as a hardware problem, this is the first time I dropped my phone in 2 years, but I had a similar issue before and had to manually remove the battery and it would work fine after that. Also I have been using privacy guard and have heard that depending what you deny access could prevent the phone from responding.

Remedies I already tried:
Repeated swiping
rubbing my knuckle on the screen (as one user suggested...)
removing battery
verifying the connector was connected
formatting and installing cm-11-20141112-SNAPSHOT-M12-d2lte and cm-11-20150412-NIGHTLY-d2lte
Safe Mode
Battery drain

 

[Madbat]

If it's hardware, that's thought to figure out what exactly failed. If it's software, make a backup in recovery and odin back to stock to see if it changes anything.
On a side note, have you tried cm12.1? It's badass.