Not Living Long Enough!? (in General)

Okay, what's with that statement when applied to mages? In the end, all mages have to be able to deal enough damage to kill their opponents. Whether you use CoC, or FB, or even the highly touted MM, does it really matter?

If you're fighting a 4 minion team, all most definitely, the fight will last 5 rounds. Probably more like 6. After 6 rounds, almost all the DD are evened out. Anyone else ever thought that maybe each DD is just better against certain strategies? When using DD, the chances of you ever dominating, completely, at the top is near zero. Because eventually you just can't keep your DD growing as fast as enemy tank's weapons grow.

My CoC, will, after a few rounds, deal as much damage as any MM. But people say MM goes faster. Starts dealing damage faster. So what? Unless it gets the KILL faster, it doesn't matter. Unless a team kills the damage dealer faster, it really doesn't matter. The only problem with CoC is that it gets hurt more by GA and AMF. Reduce it's ridiculous penalty to AMF, and the issues go away a bit. Reduce it's spread to a maximum of 3 minions and it would be great.

Basically, aside from this rant, my question is simple. Why does it matter? If my CoC dies in the 2nd round, most likely, the MM mage would be dead. Against one minions teams, and 2, MM has the edge, because it gets to the damage dealer faster. But near the top, when so many run 4 minions, why does it matter?

Sorry. This just frustrates me.

Hubbell runs a large MM and a big SF (when it is online). Coupled with DM, that meant I killed a lot of teams within 2-3 rounds (the first "round" being HoC-granted).

In other words, I killed most teams (that I could beat) before CoC would even fire.

How can you say it _doesn't_ matter? You are right in that as long as you can beat opponents, who cares. Beat the biggest folks you can with as little as possible. I don't care what you use. But saying length of battle doesn't really matter is like saying the difference between an archer and melee-based tank team is negligible too. In some cases that's true -- a huge ToE team with good HP replenishment and PL is going to be hard to beat no matter it uses. But in some other cases, quick kill vs long-haul-with-damage-reduction is the VERY question, meaning that living long enough is exactly what matters.