Mage

The mage is a class which uses magic to fight.
The best way to fight as a mage is to use a shield and castig his special skills with the function keys (F1-F4)

The mage's skillset is centered around highly damaging attack spells and mana boosting abilities. Upgrades to attack spells increase damage, mana cost, and also the cooldown time between shots, leaving large gaps of time where another weapon and extensive dodgjing are required to remain effective.

Spells can be accessed while the inventory is open either by the menu where skills are upgraded or by clicking the the button under the lock up in the top left. The Mage Quest can be accessed by talking to the Dye Trader, and requires you to have a Ironskin potion in your inventory.

Mage Casting Times

When casting any spell with a cast time, the mage's speed is dropped to a fraction (vertical speed and jumping are not affected). Should the mage be moving the casting bar fills at half speed, up to doubling cast time if moving throughout.

Wisdom lowers cast time by up to ~50%. All skill cast times are calculated at level 130 with a Demon Mage with 0 stat points spent, while standing still. Mana costs are ignored as being massively variable dependent on stats or level. Counts are typically estimated, so anyone with a stopwatch and some dedication might be able to refine timings better.

Note that moving sideways or vertically on Rope or Chain neither effects casting speed nor the speed of moving on the chains, which is about the same as moving while casting, so if you must move while casting, do it on rope where possible.

Skills
1: Fireball fires a fast moving, long range projectile that bounces off walls multiple times. It does not pierce. May possibly cause burning, nothing survived more than a single hit in testing to confirm. There is a slight delay between each shot when firing, so each firebolt may head in a different direction. Despite damage not being marked as a % figure, damage appears to be magic weapon based and correlates with a +220% damage at level 10.

2: Waterbolt generates a series of projectiles in a wide, inconsistent arc. They bounce off walls and pierce a number of enemies.

3: Magic Missile fires a projectile in a straight, consistent line towards the cursor, with a fraction of a second's delay between each consecutive shot.

4: Summon Food places a foodstuff directly into inventory. If there are no slots, the spell fails without notice.

5: Mana and Life Bonds does not appear to work against Corruptors or any other form of Crimson/Corruption entity. Since the creatures it does work on are pretty rare in Hardmode, this makes testing the effect difficult, but I assume it turns the creatures in question into hearts/mana stats.

6: Wild Thorns causes a series of wall-piercing thorn projectiles to stretch out from shortest to longest. They consistently fan out over about 210 degrees, with the longest facing towards the mouse cursor, and the shortest proceeding either clockwise (Mouse on the right side of character), or anti-clockwise (mouse on left side of character) in slightly over a semi-circle. As more thorns are added, the "gaps" in the circle grow smaller, while the range of the thorns gets longer ranged at higher levels, up to 2/3 of the way from the centre to the edge of the screen.

7: Asides from number of beams, Shadow Beam works identically to the magic weapon of similar name. Each beam focuses on the current point of the cursor when fired and each fires a fraction of a second after the one before it. Despite being marked as a 193% bonus damage, a maxed Shadow Beam consistently hit for over 2000% damage in testing. Each beam fires a smaller bonus per shot, until the final shot is around 400%.

Final Level Stat Bonuses

Skill Ratings

Silly Tier

Create Food - Produce an item that's either in easy, endless supply (Mushrooms, Goldfish, Glowing Mushroom), an item that's easily replaced by something easy and endless (Pumpkin Pie, Cooked Fish), or something which is infinite if you have a sandgun. When you're spending eight skill points just to avoid using the stove, you should probably just buy takeout.

Mana and Life Bounds - Eaters are neither dangerous enough to need an instant kill, nor common enough in hardmode to serve as a reliable strategy. It's not even worth a place on the skill bar.

Meh Tier

Magic Missile - You're throwing around either a mediocre single shot, or a similarly mediocre deca-shot. The only skill that doesn't bounce, pierce, or otherwise do anything useful. Why bother?

The Tier at and above which you probably want points in.

Concentration Viritude - As a mage, you're likely to have more than enough mana (at least if you do the sensible and top out Wisdom). If you're running out of mana, chances are you're doing something wrong or you forgot to equip one of the many, many mana restoring techniques already available in vanilla. 5 points for prerequisites is plenty.

Fireball - It's the only "good" spell that lacks pierce. Better than Magic Missile, certainly, but it doesn't really compare to the other skills.

Mana Recovery - This appears to work by adding to the amount of mana you gain in a single "tick". So if you'd be restoring 1 mana a second, with this maxed, you'd be restoring 7. With the stipulations about how easy mana recovery is, that's still pretty decent,

Staple Tier

Waterbolt - Solid power, quick cast time, and a piercing, bouncing projectile. A solid spell for when you've maxed the other skills.

Wild Thorns - A wall piercing, seemingly infinite penetration spell with multiple angles, a short cast time and a quick cooldown. With each thorn sticking around for several ticks worth of damage, this would be the most damaging, useful spell in a mage's repertoire, especially in the tight quarters of cave fighting where its shorter range isnt as big an issue.

The Bug Abuse Tier

Shadow Beam - At level 10 this skill deals 1385% base attack damage, and that's just the primary beam. With ten beams, and potentially multiple hits from each, that's easily hundreds of thousands of points of damage per use, or "only" a hundred or so with no walls around.

Builds

In both cases I'd actually recommend the exact same skillpoint distribution, but for stats, you can actually go for either damage (the obvious 130/130 Wisdom/Intelligence) or survival.

With a Hallow Shield and no points at level 130, Block Rate is 67% (and notably, Block Rate caps out at 75% and mage spells don't break Blocking.

57 Vitality brings your total with class bonuses to 60, which is enough to cap your block rate to 75%, while raising your healtth, defense, and health regeneration. The equivalent amount of Strength necessary is 93 total (86 points invested), which is meh, so:

57 Vitality, 130 Wisdom, 73 Intelligence.

Recommended Pet: Tiki Spirit.

Max block, a sizeable amount of health, fastest skill casts, and lower mana costs. Your defense will still be pretty pathetic, being a mage, but getting hit about a third less often than a 0 vitality build isn't a terrible trade-off for dealing a sixth less damage per hit.