Casters eventually have to go through the same 5% & masterwork rune gearing hell as mundanes when they hit 30 if they want to perform at their best. And if your caster didn't, congratulations! You don't know what we're talking about, and you can go sit down. It's fine.
What Casters -don't- have to do -- for the most part -- is continuously fork over huge gobs of cash for consumables, sometimes player made, which is a fluctuating market and which the prices are never -quite set- in order to participate in PVE /and/ PVP. Almost all consumable use on a caster is optional.
Except for FoM and NEP. Only way to get those on wizards and sorcs are consumables. Sucks, but. Eh. As someone who's ran several mundanes to 30, it's a hell of a lot cheaper than paying for FoM, Haste, NEP, Barkskin, Zoobuffs, Bless Weapon, Death Ward, Improved Invisibility, Shield, Mage Armor,(Though both have reusable equipment that helps cut that cost.) Skleens, Healing Pots or Kits.(Though arcane casters do still have to buy some form of healing.) Situational stuff like Clarity and LMB...
You wanna stay in Improved Invisibility for more than 7 minutes? One of the most useful buffs? Yeah. Get ready to pony up 700 gold for every additional seven minutes.
Want FoM or NEP for a decent price? Better hope you got UMD on your build, or you're gonna be paying out the nose, because the scrolls are expensive and the potions are -miserable- to make.
Most casters have most of these spells covered on their spell list, or function just fine without them in the majority of situations right now. I use zoo pots on my wizard, but only because I want those spell slots. I'm fully aware that if I didn't, I wouldn't have to. My spell comp cost is pretty negligible, too, as most situations in PVE don't call for 7-9th level spells.
Anyways, I hate it. I wasn't around when loremageddon was implemented, but now I'm starting to think that the idea of letting a whole bunch of classes have full access to a suite of buffs and spells that they wouldn't normally have access to by throwing money at it has had the balance effect of making it -miserable- and -necessary- for mundanes to fork over huge sums of cash, rather than having class progression designed around -not- having those essential buffs.
You think it's miserable when the two charges of a runic sequence you use got wasted because a server crashed? Imagine the 5k a fighter spends every time they want to go do a difficult dungeon.
It's a dumb design paradigm, and I'll say it again: Balancing classes between convenience and power and saying that it has to be this way is. Just. Not. Not good, man. It's just dumb. It leaves a lot of people feeling like their class sucks for no good reason, and a lot of other people performing a cost analysis every time they so much as breathe at an adventure.
In conclusion, down with the economy, viva la revolution.