How bad are mages solo in level-appropriate dungeons?

[Troxx]

When soloing mage 50+ I considered my pet a dot that soaked damage. Cheap cost summon. Clicky haste and clicky DS it. Pull a mob (assuming solo pull) and reclaim pet when the mob is low and toss a low level nuke the last bit. Pet generally survives without actual help letting you med through and break even after reclaim. If it’s a harder mob, toss a nuke or 2 so mob dies before pet bites it ... reclaim etc etc. harder mobs obligates some down time.

Very viable. Not terribly inefficient. And you get a mob dead for a lot less mana than some other casters. Is it great? Nah. Can you “dungeon crawl” level appropriate content 50+? Nah? Is it decent xp while you wait for a group? Absolutely.

Like Tox said … grab a partner or 3. Mages are very powerful in groups. For what they do well, few do it better.

Solo? Not so much, but still viable if you pick your hunting grounds carefully.

[Snaggles]

Again, aside from the aggro transfer thing (which is more a guideline than a rule...its not 100%), mages are pretty bad at crawling.

A. You cant crawl with a pet
B. You cant really heal the pet at a scaling level
C. No CC (or splitting spells) outside root nets and earth pet
D. Just general mana issues, health issues, and NPC scaling

I love the mage, I have one whos 60 with some of the toys. ToV trains, group dps (non raid). It's very fun and not necessarily "weak". It's a point-and-shoot soloer though. Burn downs are necessary so its best to find single spawns. Or using as little mana as possible and poofing the pet, clean up nuking the low health mob.

I personally like the class more than the necro and have one of those too. You can't compare the two though, not in the slightest. One's basically a hybrid in it's trick bag, one is hyper specific.