Mage Viability

It's really sad to see that only a few mages are ever truly viable at any given time now-a-days. I'm tired of seeing the safe, easy to use, high damage, low risk mages in every game. Why bother picking high risk skillshot champs like or when the reward is the same with safer picks like the boring old ,, , ? The problem with mages is that even though they're SUPPOSED to be the magical bursty class, only the ones with short cd aoe/targetted and therefore high dps mages are picked. Gone are the days where hard to land skillshot combos are rewarded with mages. The risk is simply too high. With AP items constantly getting the shaft in terms of cost efficiency compared to AD items, it seems the pool of viable mages keeps shrinking smaller and smaller. Let's not even mention how these same champions require half the mana, time, and sometimes even half the cds ( ) needed to clear waves. Don't get me wrong, I know buffing long range mages would just let them 100-0 you from fog of war, but I'd really like to see these risky picks have higher payoffs than they do now. Burst means almost nothing this season with the clusterfuck of shields and heals flying around, but at least AD assassins hardly ever have to land single target skillshots to do their job, and even so, their auto attacks still hurt like trucks while long range mages have to sit around sucking their thumbs until their cds are up again once they miss. Overall, I feel like this season has the been the worst season in terms of champion viability and I'm not expecting Rito to have any bright ideas... ever really. Until then, let's just all play the good ol AD Ranged Point Click Sustained Burst DPS sub-class consisting of