Defeat the Emperor with Lesser Heal

[MongoJerry]

This also applies to the mage's offensive arsenal.  High-level mages who go item hunting are gathering equipment that can add over 200 points of damage to fire.  Plug that in to the mage's fast-casting Rank 1 Fireball and you can see how sick that would get, while using almost no mana.

Actually, the biggest unbalance when it comes to mages and items is how they work with aoe spells. In the Blackrock Depths instance, there's a room called the Lyceum that has hundreds of non-elite dwarfs in it, all on fast 60 second respawn timers. It's a neat challenge that's different from your usual "pull a small number of mobs, kill them, repeat" instance encounter. You often get swarmed by 10-15 dwarfs at a time, so aoe is hugely important. If the mages spec's in arcane, has improved aoe, and then wears a lot of +damage items, they can totally clean house. That 200 points you mentioned gets multiplied by every target in Arcane Explosion's radius, so in that room, you're talking about a bonus of 2000-3000 damage per cast.