I played a wizard to the high 50's in the live days and just dinged 36 on my wizard here on p99 last night before bed
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As a lot of folks are saying, mages are a blast. I used to borrow my friends 55 mage to farm plat and just crush lower level dungeons/guards/creatures etc with zero effort. The pets are great, do good damage, tank well, and proc a lot. Mages are fun and you can play mage more constantly (less sitting around doing nothing).
Wizards are hard. The early levels are brutal and you just suck and die a lot and watch the pet casters run around on ez-mode (not really, but relative).
Wizards are good second charcters. When you can get your int to 200 at level 16 and quad with SOW potions....it is a lot better twinked and the second time around.
I'm a solo person. I soloed 1-36 on my wizard, 1-45 on my shaman, 1-31 on my nec. I did group with my shaman just for dungeon adventures, but if I'm just going to be killing things outdoors I can do it on my own pretty quickly and well on most classes. Even my warrior solos blues and the downtime isn't bad because troll + ikky regen BP.
Quadding makes up for a lot of the mana regeneration...you can kill 1.5 mobs per mana bar, or you can kill 4 while quadding. It is pretty sweet. When you start getting Pillar and Column line of spells you can do this, you don't have to wait to Cobalt Scar to slaughter things as a wizard
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It is worth noting that SOW 10 shots are only 50pp per if you have a shaman make them, the trivial level is very low.