Once you've done even a half-assed attempt to look into non-limited regear, you begin to realize it is impossible to have decent stats across the board and still do any appreciable damage even as a mage.

I usually try to gear for -20 svs spell or so (along with +5ish str/dex and roughly 20-25 damroll when wielding 1-2 weapons and very often leave hitroll at 10-15 as a result), but just the 3-4 gear slots it takes to do that hampers you so much in the stats or dam department that you start to reconsider it when there's no lowbie AP or mages trying to get free kills using chameleon and vulns. It ultimately weakens you against the actual melee characters you should be worried about. Add in svs para specifically to deal with transmuters and it gets even more complicated, as the ONLY decent svs para pieces that still let you cover other stats such as HP, are limited and everyone and their mom collects them now relative to as recently as a couple years ago. Your other options mean you are using just svs para which means you need to be able to throw those pieces on, hunt down, and successfully kill the transmuter in question in under the space of an RL hour, often an impossible task if the muter is using duo and you have no information about hometowns. And I am talking specifically about mobs you walk up and kill without losing more than 40% of your HP from 20 onward.

To a certain degree, gearing defensively comes with tradeoffs, and the only way to overcome those tradeoffs is the limited gear. This is by design, but you really start to feel the pain when you have to deal with magic damage or massive stat loss at an earlier level than you ordinarily should have to. Another example is even if an assassin doesn't get the enhanced kot/kans, the stat loss from those skills cannot be covered, and generally you lose the fight once both land if you aren't wearing some pimp limited +str gear in particular and hopefully +dex. As a lowbie you are looking at being at 15 or worse in one or both stats once both land, so at that point it's a matter of if you can flee and who has the better connection speed pre-40.