I think the perception that wizards are gimped comes from a variety of factors:
First, a wizard requires more skill than a mage or necro. Before people flame me for this comment, think carefully. A good wizard is always tethering their aggro and mana balance. Their fast nukes can cause an inexperienced player to nuke excessively causing their ultimate demise. A mage does not suffer this same fate. They send pet in and their cast time is a lot longer. They will usually not have time to generate the hate a wizard can. A wizard is not as simple as /pet attack, cast nuke, etc. A player has to think carefully whether or not this is the mob they need to burn down or is it better to do some damage and saving their mana for that nasty pull when they need to kill several mobs or possibly evac the group.
Another contributing factor to the gimpness of wizards is their bursty dps. Yes a wizard can burn down a single mob in the shortest amount of time (except maybe a team of SKs HTing a mob, though I recall this being nerfed too at some point) but because of mana limitations, their dps will suffer over a sustained duration of time. The mage and necro will not have this problem as their pet will continue to do damage even if they themselves are out of mana. Factor in the damage shield that a mage can cast and that damage is also independant of existing mana once it is cast.
In a raid situation, the necro and mage have other options for their mana. The mage functions as a rod summoner and the necro as mana battery. The wizard has no other alternative but to be dps. The pet issues on raid mobs has already been mentioned and without pet hold, many encounters are preferred not to have a pet so the mage and necro are forced to their alternative role. I have seen many mages and necros complain of this over the years but unfortunately, this is the best use of their mana (and was always the case until rods were nerfed during PoP era and twitching became trivial once cheal no longer became the preferred method of healing).
The last factor I can think of is, because wizards take some more skill than a necro or mage to play, having a less than adequate wizard in your group is very obvious. We all have seen the wizard that ninja afks to no end, the wizard who panic gates, the wizard who overaggros and kills himself, or worse yet, the cleric who goess oom trying to save aforementioned wizard. The pet classes we're comparing wizards to are a lot more forgiving in terms of skill. That is not to say wizards are so hard to play but just require a little more thought. This is also not a bash on mages and necros as there are plenty of skilled players playing those classes as well.
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