Mages were HORRIBLE at launch

[DMN]

I remember a lot of people being convinced that pet spells were harder to make, both necro and mages.

But I think the main problem was so many people had garbage for research skill since there wasn't an easy way to raise it. No one really cared that much about the other research spells so if they failed it was like "meh". But the pets? necro/mages won't soon stop ruminating on that, nor complaining about it on the internet.