they are.
Another source of the mages dps are the pets. If you don’t have already done, get the best pet-focus earring you can find asap, if not already done.
Most mages may use the actual “spear”-spell and the last expansions “spear” spell. If yours does as well, set ”xp to Aa” to 100 and stick all aas into the focus-aa of the “spear”-line, upto atlest the second-last available level, to get it to work for those spells.
Next would be the actual arm-armor to get a functional fire-focus for the actual spear-spells.
At this point the pet-aas and the nuke-empowering aas may shall be the next to work on.
Leveling chars without getting atleast the level-appropriate important aas isn’t very effective in the long run, as getting further aas gets harder and harder, the bigger the gap becomes between level and their appropriate important aas.
This is valid for all classes. I recommend to hold leveling and focus on the important aas as long as it takes, to pull them up to be on par with the level.