Very good thoughts! I hadn't factored in the reduction to racials and runes. My next archmage will definitely run heavy meta/aether to see how that rolls.Congeal Time is nice but too slow, most non-melee enemies won't actually get hit by it. Time Shield is amazing and Time Prison is great too. However, I still like Meta a bit more than Temporal late game (Temporal is obviously better early because Meta takes a very long time to shine and Temporal has Time Shield). Meta has Disperse Magic, which can delete about 6 sustains from an enemy mage making them much weaker (final bosses are a great example). Spellcraft is only good on some builds but it makes Aether Breach and Aether Beam more powerful than they already are. I like Quicken Spells a bit more than Essence of Speed because global speed isn't very good once everything useful you have is on cooldown. For example, once Inferno is used, a Wildfire Archmage's damage primarily comes from three talents: Flame, Fireflash, and Blastwave. Without any cooldown reduction, the cooldown of these talents are 3, 5, and 8. With 40% cooldown reduction (30% from Quicken Spells, 10% from boots or pickaxe) these cooldowns are reduced to 2, 3, and 5. This means I'll almost always have a very powerful spell off cooldown, while with Essence of Speed and no cooldown reduction I'd be reduced to using filler spells like Manathrust and Lightning for damage. It's also worth noting that Quicken Spells applies to Shalore racials and Runes, so a Shalore with 40% cooldown reduction and 5/5 Grace of the Eternals can have over 50% uptime and with Timeless, you could keep the buff up for 21 turns.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with getting both Meta and Temporal. I just like Meta a bit more than Temporal overall.
In terms of spell rotation though, I found that I had many spells in my rotation that were *not* archmage anyways. Against the hardest monsters (and that's all that we are really talking about) I had found Gwai's Burninator and the Rod of Annulment on my last run. That, coupled with the rod of spydric poison (which is insanely good) meant that I had three other spells to weave in to my rotation as well. Then there is the AoE blindness which cannot be ignored. Once these are added in, you can keep your burning wake with 100% uptime for overall burn, while still adding in the effects from other sources.
The only thing I would see missing would be the increase to movement speed achieved with essence of time, but since your spell cooldowns are decreased by 40%, you get phase door that much quicker?
I already took meta to get disperse magic. That skill alone is worth a cat point in high peak...I could have saved the cat point from timeless and gotten celestial light. Timeshield endgame with Aegis was 1200 or so, you are correct, not gamebreaking.
Thanks for this, I had been threatening to make an aether/meta archmage for my next nightmare run, and now you have convinced me
Cheers.