Currently running my first Paradox Mage, and so far he's been good, didn't died once and i'm now preparing myself for Dreadfell after clearing all the dungeons from my zone order list.
Though he's a Thalore, so i'm behind in leveling and only reached level 22 from killing Urkis.
My first observation was that there are an insane amount of skills making it really hard to choose.
My second observation is that the damage spells are rather weak, that's why you'll need to take several of the attack spell so you can at least get decent damage, fortunately the class has several escape option that help in keeping distance for you so you can cast several damaging spell to kill your target
My third observation is that you finally get a very damaging attack spell when you get to Gravity Well (you know the highly damaging aoe spell that was pinning you when you were in Briarg Lair and ran into gravity worms) and Redux, somewhere between level 12 and 14.
And then once you have those 2 maxed, the Paradox Mage become something to be really feared, as you have still all your good escape skills but instead of having to cast multiple weak ranged spells to kill things, you can now throw one of those strong gravity well that will pin enemies and deal some good damage per turns , lasting for several turns .
Even better, if you cast redux just before, instead of casting only 1 gravity well and wait the cooldown, you can cast 2 gravity well in a sequence (then wait for the cooldown)!
Then you can walk away to get some breath and come back to count the loot from the enemies corpses.
I don't know how this will scale later or during Dreadfell, but at that point of the game i feel confident the character is good.
Only problem with having to max magic and willpower and constitution (constitution to help against the low health gain by levels of the paradox mages to complement the great damage reducing sustains you have) , it's that you have no point left for cunning, meaning it's much harder to get criticals .
So you can only hope for great +cunning items, but as you already need to get +health items, that's not going to happen.
EDIT :
Defeated the Master in Dreadfell in a classic battle of attrition, with double Gravity Well (thanks to Redux), making a paradox clone of myself (splitting the timeline) to help in firepower, teleport away when he surrounds me with his summons, rest and come back , that until he died 2 times.
Then the Ambush, i annihilated quickly the orcs with gravity well and my teleporting around (Dimensional Step) and getting my paradox clone to help. But their boss with its insane amount of health was still standing and hard to hurt.
So i started to build a very high amount of paradox due to how much things i shot him with, it's then that i noticed that only having 1 in Static History was not making me lose paradox points fast enough, so with that guy high health my paradox started to go nuts.
Summoned a bunch of farmer, teleported me randomly and as i was finally near to kill that boss, a last paradox effect exploded me , and from the log, it killed the boss too.
Unfortunately the game counted that situation as if the ambush was successful against me despite there was no more orcs, so the staff was taken from me.
On my trip back to Last Hope, i ran into the Crypt, i decided to give a try and to my surprise completed it and saved Melinda, there were several hard situation, but the Paradox Mage can get out of so many thing it's impressive (and summoning treants from the Thalore racial is always another helpful additional escape helper)
So far,
the guy has reached level 26, going soon to Reknor, i'm already bored just thinking of those very long and similar looking uninteresting Reknor levels.