It depends on how long the fight is. There reaches a point where the Wizard's compressed damage doesn't matter because it takes so long to kill the target that melees do more damage over the course of the fight anyway. The Wizard is no longer actually allowing the team to kill the target any faster than they would have if a melee had been there instead of the Wizard (the opposite, in fact).
That speaks not just to class imbalance but also how poorly the combat mechanics and the combat encounters themselves were designed by that point (stand around auto-attacking and chain-healing with Clerics...so boring). There's a massive gulf of improvement that Everquest needs in this regard. Now if only someone would make a game with the fundamentals that made Everquest so amazing + implementations that allow those fundamentals to not be ruined by players trying to play the game as if it was color-by-the-numbers + vastly improved (and varied) combat mechanics and combat encounters.
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