I didn't play Live so some portions of your post are confusing to me, but played a mage to 65 here and box aisling when he is changing bedpans so:
-I main a wizard here and the lineup is more like concussion, nuke nuke where nuke is your best nuke not on cooldown. (Depending on resists this is either one or 2 nukes) Depending on the fight I can have two completely empty spellgems on my wizard without losing efficacy. It's actually kind of lame, I often wish I had more buttons to push.
-DS lasts for several hours, keeping it on your bar is pretty silly. Some self buffs with shorter durations are indeed useful but they often have durations that are long enough that you don't need to keep them on your spellbar, you mem them once every hour or so and refresh.
-you won't really be replacing any of your primary spells with clickies or AAs, the only MAYBE exception is mend pet for pet heal spell, but as my comments below mention it's worthwhile to use both rather than re summon a pet
-if you are a mage and not casting mod rod every time people use a round of modrods every caster will want to punch you in the dick
-pet heal is on that lineup to prevent "pet replacement," the mana cost and cast time of pet summon spells plus the efficacy of a buffed pet vs an unbuffed one make it better to keep your pet alive in the first place than to resummon it
-if "warm up" means "cool down" then the rains are twistable on a 1 for 1 basis which I never found too annoying. Monster summons do have a lengthy cooldown but are pretty awesome
-there aren't gate AAs for mages but they do have access to clickies and potions that will gate them, I'd rather use the extra spell slot for something that keeps me alive/kills mobs, even soloing.
Hopefully that didn't come across too snappy but you seemed to have some misconceptions about how some mage stuff works.
For shits and giggles my spell set for a mage is usually:
1. Malo
2. Malosini
3. Archaic Rain
4. Other Rain
5. Modrod
6. MS 4
7. MS 3
8. Pet Heal
Maybe I have misconceptions because my mage is 52?
Anyway, yes, it does sound a bit different from live. On my wizard from live, I had AA flappy (no spell gem), clicky rune shield, conc pants, etc. So the spell lineup was pretty much as noted above. Also resists are much less there, and the main nukes don't have a cool down, with the exception of the Ice Spear line, which you don't use on raids for the most part.
Nobody cares about modrods in groups so far, but it's nice (?) to know that changes later.
warm-up <=> cool-down
The level 49 DS is the first one that seems to last more than 15 minutes, so I'm happy to hear that it lasts forever later on.
As far as pet replacement goes, this is an interesting difference from live. There was no reuse timer on pet summons like there is here, so you can chain summon them if you want. Finally, I gather that fights are much shorter here. From what I remember of live, 20-60 minute fights were not uncommon. I would assume that pet classes kept the spell up, because the opportunity cost of losing a pet was large. I know my beastlord never took that spell down (and kept the pet haste up too until he got clicky pants).
There are also no MS spells on live permanently occupying slots.
Speaking of spell lists for wizards on live, the emp algorithm for wizards is:
1) Ice Spear
2) Rend Robe
3) Sunstrike
4) Conc
5) repeat for 45 minutes
So, in summary, it wouldn't break my heart if things were more interesting here
edit: I should be so hard on live, there was some spell shielding in there....
