ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I never played a Paradox Mage pre-1.3.0 (didn't get the unlock until close to patch time, and just figured I'd wait), but I read up on their talents and looked at some guides, and thought they looked sweet! Having finished a run with my first Paradox Mage a few weeks ago, I couldn't help but feel, well, a little sad. Their new talents seem both less fun and less flavorful.

• Age Manipulation isn't the most original tree, being a weird mix of disables, debuffs, DoT, and status cleanse/heal. But it's also really flavorful. Yank your enemies' underdeveloped, juvenile bodies forward in time? Restore a backup of you from a few turns ago before you got stacked with debuffs? Awesome!
• Gravity wasn't changed much, but Repulsion Field sounded very cool. Gravity Locus may be more important in opening up gravity-heavy play, but just doesn't feel quite as fun to me.
• Granted, Matter was also a little weird, but had some synergies. Other than a few of the talents not scaling well, the new one seems good overall.
• Paradox kept Cease to Exist at least (which I find a very cool, fun talent), and maybe Paradox Mastery was replaced with more interesting ways of managing your paradox via the Flux tree. But no more Paradox Clone? How sad! Or maybe it was just broken balance- or coding-wise. IDK.
• Gather the Threads was a unique and flavorful resource management option with an upside (+spellpower). The old Rethread seems like it could have been pretty OP, but again, very cool. Temporal Clone? Come on, that's just pure awesome.
• Chronomancy and Energy were just retooled a bit; nothing major (probably good changes all-around).
• Losing Banish from Spacetime Weaving seems like a huge loss, since the rest of the Spacetime Folding tree seems really bleh, as does the Dimensional Shift talent that took Banish's original place. Which is a shame for a talent that really shapes the way the PM played (from what I hear).
• That said, Flux is an amazing tree and a lot of fun. It further differentiates the PM from other classes resource-management-wise. So that's a big win. Time Shield is very good to have, too (even if I didn't invest in Stasis on my run; wanted too badly to try out Timeline Threading, Flux, and Energy). I didn't realize Attenuate could stack with itself, but that has a lot of potential for great shenanigans with Seal Fate.

So I guess at the end of it, I'm wondering if anyone else feels this way, or if it's just me. I'm also wondering what the reasons behind the changes were. Were Chronomancers (or just PMs) out of control? Were they not working well within the engine? Were they not unique? Or something else?

I haven't played TW since 1.3.0. It was probably my favorite winner so far by a long shot, but I'm just not motivated to scope out the changes with how sad I am over the Paradox Mage changes. Anyone able to make me reconsider?

Paradox Mage just had a bunch of damage and a crappy heal. Playing it is a much better experience after the rework than before. If anything I think TW lost more interesting stuff (Damage Smearing) than PM did.

Nooooo...... Damage Smearing was the best!

Old Paradox Mage was far more boring and weak compared to the new one. There's pretty much nothing I miss about it. Damage Smearing and Temporal Wake were cool but TW are still far better now.