Currently playing a mage right now, I have a pretty good feeling for how things are.

My idea is simple:

- Keep the current sleek system the way it is.

- Make the new mage shield substitute spell compatible with shield, but incompatible with barrier.
**This will make some of the "harder-impossible" barrier locations do-able, as well as take away some of the tedium of not being able to find your said barrier, since you'll have that extra little boost of DR, while not quite up to par with barrier. This will also not completely cheapen sleek sienna rods, while only slightly cheapening sleek blacks.

- Make Detect Artifact 100% fire on sleeks.
**I know this has been said many times in this thread and keeps coming up, but... I really don't see this taking away from it much. Sleeks are suppose to be crazy magical, it should detect it all the time... Limited ones can be faulty, but having it not fire on sleeks is just wrong, especially when you have been running around areas you've already explored many times prior on other chars, etc...this just makes you wanna rip your hair out.

I think this pretty much sums it up.