Necromancers Versus Magicians As Soloers

[Estu]

Some of you may remember my thread earlier about shamen versus druids, in which I was trying to decide which to play. This isn't that; I'm just curious here because of something I've been hearing.

Essentially, I hear all the time about how overpowered mages are, how fast they solo, how much damage they do in groups, and so on. Yet I don't hear this nearly as much about necromancers. Yet, let's look at the facts. As I understand it, the way high level mages take down monsters is they buff the pet, send the pet at it, and maybe nuke it once or twice. If the monster is tough, they'll chain summon the pet.

Let's now look at the necromancer. The necromancer is also capable of chain summoning, and he also has at his disposal dots, lifesteal, hit point to mana conversion, snare, fear, and feign death (I may have forgotten something, but this list is pretty impressive as is). But mages are the ones that are overpowered?

The only way I can see this being the case would be if mage pets were leaps and bounds better than necro pets. And I'm willing to accept this, but I'd like some discussion on it. I know that mages get the nice damage shield on the fire pet (though necros get dots...) and the nice root on the earth pet (though necros have root and snare...). The real breaking point would have to be pet levels or stats; if mages are really so much more overpowered than necros, their pets must have far better stats and/or be far higher leveled than necro pets. Is this the case?

By the way, I'm a bit confused about the effects of weapons on mobs and pets. Mobs don't seem to be at all affected by the weapon they're wielding; an orc centurion (say) wielding nothing, a cracked staff, or a rusty dagger appears to do the same amount of damage and have the same amount of delay (correct me if I'm wrong; I've seen mobs do huge damage with rusty daggers, which is pretty perplexing). What about pets? I've heard varying things, and I might be misremembering, but the two situations I've heard described are that either 1) pets take on only the delay of their weapon but are unaffected by the damage, so low delay weapons make them super-powerful, or 2) pets take on both the damage and delay of their weapon. How do monster and pet weapons work?