So How are mages?

[Tethyr]

Religion wise it's better to be agnostic; there's really nothing amazing for mages that is religion specific and agnostic makes faction way less complicated whether you are a good/evil race. As far as race goes, just pick whatever looks cool. It's very easy to hit the int cap and mages really don't need gear at early levels.

As far as soloing pet tanking really isn't a problem. Most people are going to recommend you solo with the fire pet, I leveled my mage fairly quickly using the fire pet exclusively (the innate damage shield on the firepet typically outweighs the benefit of the increased HP of the earth pet).

Make sure you do the Sol magician quests for the mage focus items ASAP, Torch of Alna, Shovel of Ponz ect. These items increase the HP of your pet and make a very big difference, especially at lower levels.

If you're pulling aggro from your pet, then you're doing something wrong. Your basic routine is going to be:

1. Use level 1 nuke to pull mob
2. Send pet in
3. Wait
4. Once mob starts to run either use the clicky from your focus item or hard cast reclaim energy. This will kill your pet; the reason to do this is that you've done almost no damage to the mob, your pet has done all the work. If your pet does more than 50% damage you only get 50% experience from the kill. The solution is to reclaim your pet then nuke the mob down, getting full exp.
5. Resummon, rinse, repeat.

There are some variations to the above (you can chain summon etc.) but generally that is what is safest/easiest. The real problem with mages is that they have no CC: you will be able to dungeon crawl solo to a degree but will inevitably reach camps that you cannot break yourself (which is lame, we don't even get root). This really isn't a huge deal if your interest is farming plat; mages make pretty good farmers and require no gear to be effective, though the clicky cinder bolt staff certainly helps.