[Chinatown]

Most mage abilities, homing or not have much higher cooldowns than the melee abilities, coupled with a lot less damage. So not only do pure mages lack combo potential depending on their chosen trees, but they also have fewer stats than a swordsman or a hybrid!

It's also why Sand and Explosion are pretty popular trees, they give you tools to deal with armed and unarmed; so they can't all-in and burst you with Ifrit's E which gives GCDE, for example.