With all this talk about Time Mage, if it were DPS, the dev team would have a lot of freedom on how they design the job considering the creative space DPS roles have versus healer or tank which need to be constantly balanced around the same baseline.

And considering that Sage isn't anything like it's Tactics Advance counterpart, I would say that Time Mage could be unique in its own right.

The dev team already went out of their way to removed the time spells off of AST and have been focusing on creating space themes.

Yes it's close and often times, space and time are very linked together. But I think it could work as they can have similarlities. As long as Time Magic doesn't step into having stars and constellations as part of their sfx effects.

As for how the kit would work, in a normal rpg Time Mage is still pretty broken and you can't have the same effects in an MMO. But delayed/extended based dps kit could be interesting. Time could 100% be a dot based job with its pay off being procs with properly extended dots.