The reason for the change to Etched Sigil was likely to get rid of Meteor Channelling and Bazooka Wizard builds.
Various ways have been discussed on alternative things that could be done instead of changing Etched Sigil to its current form, and today I wanna discus another option.
It will probably be disliked by some of the community, but I still wanna put it out there.
It basically goes like this: make Molten Impact baseline for the Base Skill and all Runes. That way, Meteor can not be spammed anymore and it would act as a heavy nuke with large amounts of damage and increased AoE that can only be used occasionally.
With that change, there maybe also could be some other adjustments. I am only providing examples as seen in the image above. Other things could work as well.
I gave Thunder Crash 2 Charges, since the Meteor coming down without delay and a 15 second Cooldown would be too underwhelming, so it also gives 2 Charges of Meteor.
Molten Impact now noticeably increases the damage of the ground fire, but not the impact itself.
Meteor Shower now calls down 20 Meteors instead of 7.
Comet does freeze all enemies for 3 seconds, instead of just freezing chilled enemies for 1 second.
Star Pact has its bonus damage increased by a factor of 2.5 to keep up with the general damage buff to Meteor.
And all of the runes have their base damage and AoE significantly increased.
—The numbers are of course just examples for the purpose of illustrating the concepts—
Some alternative ideas for Thunder Crash and Star Pact
Thundercrash reduces the Cooldown from 15 seconds to 12 seconds and the Meteor hits the ground immediately:
Redesign of Star Pact:
instead of consuming all remaining Arcane Power and giving you bonus damage per point of resource consumed, it now no longer has a Resource Cost and instead of a Cooldown of 15 seconds, it has 2 Charges that each take 20 seconds to recharge (that number can be adjusted)…
… but everytime you spend 15 Arcane Power, it reduces the remaining Recharge Time / Cooldown by 1 seconds, which makes you wanna play very resource intensive builds to have Star Pact available much more often. And since it doesn’t have a resource cost, it is a circle that feeds into each other. And it also has 2 Charges.
Anyway, making the Molten Impact rune for Meteor baseline would be one out of several other alternative ways to fix the issues that the Wizards Channelling builds had instead of the Patch 2.6.10 Etcehd Sigil change.