I'd like to know what the community has to say about the current state of mage classes.

In my opinion, there are a lot of things wrong with them such as the unusual level requirements for certain spells, spell animation, the way ancient magic works, and the spell set for each job making them lack a defined role. However, for me the major killer is how every spell is AoE.

I've never seen main healing become so mindless in an MMO and the lack of MP management (and support style classes) only makes it worse. I feel like very little imagination went into magic use in general.

Thoughts?