Why not move the char to another account then? If the accounts are all in your name as they should be, that is just one pizza's worth of money away.

The mage rocks! As you said there is some utility, water, bread, arcane intellect.

More importantly to save time lots of portals. Flying from anywhere but starting zones anywhere else for five chars is more expensive than the 18s for the rune, not to mention cooler and faster. I can summon someone and portal them somewhere. That includes my own main chars. I am one man travel agency! :wink:

However, the mage just like the locks does direct single target or AoE damage. While the locks pump out their DoTs the mage is busy with Pyroblast. When AoEing I use two key bindings, Alt-4 and 4. Alt-4 makes the priest shield the mage, the mage cast blast wave and the warlocks start hellfire. 4 does arcane explosion and prayer of healing as spam button while hellfire is running which provides a predictable healing target. In most cases I can fire off an AoE nuke and have the whole party at full hps after it, because the mobs used the few seconds they had remaining to beat on the mage's shield.

Last but not least, the drenai mage has a passive +1% to hit with spells buff for the whole party, which stacked with the talent based resist odds decrease helps a big deal.