Mend is a huge pain in the ass liability for early levels. You're best off spending as many points as you can at the trainer. Same for bind wound to save you lots of time and bandages.
Check the wiki for h2h ratios. Your fists beat cracked staff by a lil bit starting at lvl 10.
Since there's two of you, you can very easily corpse camp summoned gear. So bug a high lvl mage to deck you out, then duel to the death before you log out and leave all your summoned stuff on the body. Just looking through mage page on wiki:
8 of these
http://wiki.project1999.com/Dimensional_Hole_(Item) or the 6 slot variants
2 of these
http://wiki.project1999.com/Summoned..._of_Levitation for the AC (until 5/55 rings)
http://wiki.project1999.com/Summoned:_Muzzle_of_Mardu 11% haste!
http://wiki.project1999.com/Summoned:_Modulating_Rod 8/26 1hb (lore, and dont click it)
http://wiki.project1999.com/Summoned:_Staff_of_Symbols 10/34 2hb
This is something of a pain in the ass if you're on your own, but together you could keep these things for weeks easily. This is easily worth it for the bags alone, since going over a very low weight (14 stones iirc?) starts to pretty heavily reduce your AC.