I hope the devs take notice- it's a given that any number of melee dps classes would be better dps and thus preferable on raids. Wizards need to be brought back up to par when Ngreth tweaks spell damage next expansion.
I'm going to mention it just because it's a thing. Bounced alliances also happen from a lack of debuff slots. An alternative to the current mechanic is to change the debuff to a chance of a group proc buff that increases nuke damage of other wizards like a mana reiteration style proc.
I spoke to the Dev who said he is the programmer for all EQ spells( .. is that Ngrath? I didn't get his board name)at the EQ Museum event thing in San Diego. I had a conversation with him and Beimeith and he basically said that he never really meant for wizard alliance to be used in the ways it is being used IE spam claw, refresh, alliance, spam claw, nuke while claw is down.
I am confused by your statement (and honestly your list of casting spells). How else would wizards use alliance/covenant? We cast on mob, we fulminate it, we recast on mob, etc. What was the dev expecting? The problem with alliance/covenant is that there are two distinct types using the mechanism - on players for healers and on mob for dps. And the end goals aren't necessarily the same. But I cannot imagine that they want to change the basic formula for the line … spell cast, others eat up counters, fulminates into something big (or just fades). So any proposed change has to occur and work across the whole line, not just one class. Several class specific threads talk about alliance/covenant upgrading … but don't seem to understand that the change would most likely occur for all class versions. It's pretty clear that they think the healing ones are powerful (hence the time nerf and the no new ones in TBL). It's also pretty clear that they hate paladins (because their alliance was a dps one and they got no upgrade). Really the next expansion will let us know if this mechanism will stick around or will just be another footnote in spell lines since everyone will need an upgrade (or they change existing ones and kick the can so to speak out into the future). I'd really like to seem them change the idea into an aa since it seems that they have a lot more flexibility in aa mechanics than spell (ie wizard manaburn will just not cast if existing manaburn on mob … with no extra programming needed if they wanted to change dps alliances to that).
