Ok, here goes. This will be rambling, if something needs clarification, sorry.

1) Get rid of sleek black wands except the ones on the mobs that hold a full set of sleeks.

2) Get rid of limited barrier. Replace limited barrier locations with a very low limit limited shield AND aura wand in the same spot.

3) Up shield and aura dam redux to something the IMMs are ok with. I'm thinking A/S at hero would be about 33% better than the current difference between just A/S and full A/B/S. Keep the "extra location" sienna/amber edges. Possibly make shield and aura the dam redux they are now at 35, and scale up to the hero dam reduc level as you gain levels.

4) Any current sleek black location is available to ANY mage. (This is important, and I'll get to why).

Instead of spawning sleek black wands though, they spawn a random assortment of scrolls, wands and talismans. These are new items, that don't exist now. They have a big mix of abilities at a very high spell level. Examples would be Greater Enlivens (2 charge wands). Wither (Scroll). Champions Stand (Scroll). Windwalk (10 charge wand). A -- paired item set of Summon Demon and Dark Bind, 1 scroll each. Corporeal Softening (5 charge wand). A 5Xrefresh scroll. Etc etc etc. Go crazy with the ideas, make them fun and cool and make enough of them that you won't be able to "farm" any one ability. Single scroll of all invoker shields. 3 X Scroll of 3 invoker shields. You get the idea. Fun, random, really tough stuff, offensive, defensive and utility.

Make these items useable at level 51 only, so you can't abuse lowbies with them.

Make it so that only pure mage classes can use these items (give APs something to compensate, I don't know what). No thieves running around with this stuff.

Make it so that these items crumble on logoff (so farming these doesn't become something people do).

Allow access to all locations so that mages run into each other lots going to get these, adding to fights.

You can make edges related to these. Edge for goodies so they don't get "evil" themed items. Edge to make you more likely to get offensive abilities. Edge to make you more likely to get defensive abilities.

This makes being a mage MUCH cooler, in so many ways, it decreases the amount of total dam redux mages have while increasing the readily available dam redux. It forces a tactical decision, "Do I use this omfgwtfbbq scroll now or save it for later in my log on?". It gets rid of the problem of mages who ONLY fight under barrier. It opens up billions of tactical opportunities. It makes mages less survivable, and more deadly.