Good mages are great, they do more damage than wizards.

Their pets and damage shield more than make up the difference between their
blasts and a wiz's blast. Also mages are much less mana dependent for
damage so they often need to med less.

Your friend might be a great paladin (more than might, I will grant you she
is). However if you are hearing those not a legal target messages and she
blows up corpses, she does not know how to play her mage.

While bards and mages dont mix all that well (our songs dont help their
pets, we dont need their summoned bandages and our charm spells can
sometimes play havok with pets), mages are not a weak class at all. Perhaps
people dont have good experiences with them very often since mages often
solo most of their careers, thus have bad group skills and bad dungeon
skills.

When I gave up my troll warrior, I switched to a mage and always played in
groups (mostly in dungeons like Old Paw and Guk). People were amazed how
much damage a mage could bring to the group without saying "OOM" the whole
time. Also back in that day (pre people having 3 lvl 50 characters to twink
with) every tank would bow down before you when you gave them a stack of
bandages for free. I never had my pet cause a train that killed us. (On
the occasion my pet would be naughty, I would say "ETS" to the group and
gate out).

In short (TOO LATE!), mages much like most classes are viable if played well
and seemingly a horrid class if played badly.