The life of a mage and the life of a wizard.
 

What are they like?

I have a bunch of low-mid level gear leftover from a failed project and even from live and here on p99 I never touched a Mage or a Wizard.

I have been back and forth on these 2 for a long time,

Magi: I like to summon stuff it seems that 80% of the time it trash but 20 food and 20 water from 2 spells is crazy nice. Your pets are fantastic at start lvls, you can solo if you enjoy that, and seem to have more options in the game. Nukes are 2nd best.

Wizard: Hard mode, you dont have a pet. Early lvls are hard, when i mean early i mean 1- 29 and even at 29 things are hard because you need certain items to set it up. But you know porting is very much worth it, its crazy nice to port around and easy you get money. Every one hates you in groups, unless you have nice mana flow. I would rather go wizard, its just so boring waiting for your mana to come back up to do anything.

Break it down to base, Porting vs Pet

They're both good classes if you're a lazy player. The question is, do you prefer to solo, duo and group or do you prefer to raid? If you're a lazy player in the first category, Mage is a great class. If you're big into raiding, however, Wizard is a better choice.

Speaking as someone who has both, I enjoy the Mage more. The Wizard is really just a very boring class if you aren't actively raiding. It's an excellent class for mobilizing allies and killing raid targets, but quite terrible for everything else. Druids are leaps and bounds more fun and useful than Wizards for everything except raid kills. If you're thinking you want to play a Wizard and aren't a hardcore raider I would strongly advise rolling a Druid instead.

The Mage is a lot of fun to play in groups. Low actions per minute make the class very relaxing, but you're still contributing a lot of DPS and some good utility. The Mage is also quite good at grinding out plat by brute force (i.e. killing guards, seafuries, giants, mass killing mid-level dungeons) but isn't a very capable dungeon soloer on the level of a Necro, Enchanter or Shaman. Even still, If you like to solo the Mage is superior to the Wizard in every way.

Overall, as an analogy, consider the Wizard an insufferable diva: undeniable talent in your limited niche, but if you aren't singing (blasting raid mobs or porting people to raids) no one really wants to be around you because people think you suck. On the other hand, consider the Mage as a talented and versatile karaoke singer: you're never really anyone's first choice ("Need DPS, Monk or Rogue pls"), but you can roll with pretty much anything (duo/trio like crazy) and people rarely leave disappointed when you're done ("Wow, I forgot how awesome CoTH is and how much DPS Mages can put out").

Mages level easy early on and the combination of powerful pets and summoned WR bags means you can farm like crazy if you need money.

Only someone who has played a Wizard would consider a Magician versatile. Mages don't even get Root! (basically I agree with you though, the Wizard toolkit is simply appalling for 90% of EQ situations)

While they may not have a diverse set of spells their different kinds of pets allow them to do some creative things.

Also, if you go mage, get the focus items ASAP. No piece of gear will have as much impact as those. If pressed for cash, just pick one for pet you see yourself using the most. It is also neat to have an instant reclaim energy-button.

By versatile I was referring to the overall place of the Mage class in the game, rather than the breadth of their spells and abilities. Basically, despite their limitations, they can wear a surprising number of hats - i.e. they fit into a wide range of duos and trios for both XP and item farming, they easily slot into full groups as a DPS/utility, they can solo for XP amazingly well and solo grind plat very easily, they can PL decently (DS at low levels, pet reclaiming mid-high) and they have a limited but irreplaceable raid role with CoTH and are otherwise solid DPS and mana support.

All that being said, the lack of Root is annoying and constantly felt! Amazing how much difference that one spell can make to how a class plays.

carry a bag of root nets, problem solved.

If you do not want to raid, just don't do wizard. The real choice then comes down to druid versus mage. Druid is so much more versatile than wizard and only a little bit less efficient in DD spells... and for that small difference you get animal charms, roots with damage, single snares, heals, dots, buffs... it's not even funny.

Yeah, but a mage can dungeon crawl a lot better than a druid.

Also, mage spells are researched...that's always fun. :/