The problem is that the content isn't designed to cater to what a wizard offers. If huge burst damage was widely useful, it'd be different. There's very rarely a need to burn a mob down in a hurry, especially as mob hp grows to the point where you pretty much can't. Towards the end of Kunark, and certainly in Velious, it gets to the point where the mobs simply die faster if you apply the sustained DPS of a melee class throughout the entire fight. If it had been so that wizards, despite having a lower general DPS, were frequently needed to burn down mobs during hypothetical dangerous phases or whatever, they might serve a purpose. It just isn't really there, and for the vast majority of the game's content, a wizard is resigned to sitting around nuking each mob once and doing horrible DPS with no situations coming up where the ability to burn shit down becomes valuable.
The math has already been done in this thread. While rudimentary, it's pretty straight-forward - consider the damage to mana ratio, the time it takes to get that amount of mana back, and you have a general DPS figure. Then consider that a wizard contributes absolutely nothing else during combat and you have proof that the class is simply weak. Their ports are a tertiary convenience, their evacs are only needed if things don't go right (which they usually do with this playerbase, most everyone being hardcore EQ veterans who know their shit) and the ability to interrupt casters is neither rare nor particularly critical in a group setting. Plus it costs DPS for the wizard, unlike other classes.
I think the simple fact that magician nukes are only 10% worse than a wizard's while their pet approaches the DPS of an additional melee class is enough to discount wizard as a viable DPS role. And even magicians are considered sub-par. Lures are hugely mana-inefficient and are used only on the occasional raid target that can't be nuked with normal spells, and while wizards do become a bit less futile on raids, they're still far from necessary and often enough out-performed by melee anyway.
Most of this boils down to that lapse in class design vs. content design, and of course the inexcusably bad caster itemization of early Everquest. A naked wizard does the same DPS as a raid-geared one, and while the latter can do it for longer, the mana pool dilemma comes into effect on anything but boss mobs where you always start at FM. Uptime was discussed in a previous post, and anyone who knows their shit knows that a large mana pool is worthless when you never get to reach FM, and is equally worthless if the content is so easy that you frequently do. It only matters in those situations where you get to fill that huge mana pool up before using it and can then use the whole thing. Without a way of doing this on demand like you can in modern games, it becomes almost entirely worthless, and thus caster itemization is broken.
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