I'm slowly leveling a mage like you (at 65 now) and I find that if you are going to let the pet tank while two boxing shaman/mage, the boon/adept/cascade would almost be necessary to do much of anything. Those dots and hots are important in anything above trivial stuff. As for the AE slow AA, it is limited to 3 or 4 targets max. If you might be in the situation with a really bad pull or respawn, it's just better to have that AE slow/rune spell up (unlimited targets). All of the "gift of" AA line are important IMHO as you can use that gift to cast large mana cost spells (at least until you get to the point that you have so much mana you can't go oom in a battle) like the sting line spells or the proc line spells. It is an AA line though with deminishing returns as you gear up though. Though, I'm sure following xpack spells will factor in that you "should" have 40k mana at the start for tuning
. Your mileage will vary on this one I think. As for new stuff, heroic stats, clarivoyance, and the new sympathetic weapon augs seem quite important now. The cleric group heal proc has made it's way to shaman useable weapons, so meleeing when not casting and geting group heal procs at 500 procratemod seems like a good use of your time if not doing anything else.
I'm largely in the same boat as you (with less than half the AAs), I left EQ as beta began for SoD. I'm a former raiding shaman (we were in factory in SoF when I left) that's looking to get back to raiding (perhaps if time/work is going to let me) or working in the grouping game. Thing is, most of my gear isn't just obsolete, it's downright sad for alt gear atm. It was extremely scary at the mudflation when I got back and I'm now OVER 24k HP and about 2.5k AC behind in gear (ya, I know that perhaps 10-15 people in all of EQ has that as a shaman right now). Tank HP has just gotten flat out huge, my non-crit heal wouldn't even move their HP bar, literally). All that is very intimidating. Right now, I'm leveling my zerker and rogue alt accounts so that I can "full" group missions with mercs tanking and main healing for me. At least as far as that will let me go. Might go hang out in Crystallos for awhile and AAXP at 80 and gear up a bit there too. Not gearing up and try to "rely" on a group to directly upgrade to "current" gear is not really an option, AE DoTs/AE nukes/et al have crossed into the grouping game hardcore. I just will not survive there and be of use to any group (and definately in any raid capacity if work allows me to return to that type of play) it really seems like. Perhaps I'm over stating it, but I've heard horror stories of how easy SoD was to finish (thus no one but the occasional alt available for tier flagging missions), but UF sucks bad.
From what little reasearch I've done, it looks like leveling/gearing up would best be started by doing boomerrang stuff/group legacy stuff. Group legacy missions are going away (at least for a few months, but who knows) in Sept/Oct, so this might not be a real path to do unless you can pound them non-stop due to earning few beer per mission and good group gear is something like 21 or so beers each slot. The merchant is supposed to remain, but the missions will be unavailable for the new xpack release. There's rumors that the missions themselves might not come back (and others saying new missions might be available when he does return), probably due to nerfing the beers earned per mission (gear was entering the world way too quick), leveling newbies/alts very rapidly, gaining obscene amounts of AAs per mission, and the ability to afk xp in PoK/ with mission task adds. I got a strange feeling (along with looking at what is available to be bought) think the mission giver will not return. Haven't heard anything about the boomerrang missions (are they related to the legacy stuff?) going away, so it seems a viable gear up method. There's some great stuff there. Just creating an alt magelo profile with that stuff , it's like 5600HP/Mana+ and around 600 AC above what I have, along with updated focuses to level 85 (of which is really necessary for me, mine are really bad atm).
After that, I'm looking at SoD/UF progression and almost thinking to hold off until the new expansion to see if the gear from these two expansions is necessary to have to get (and I mean is it tradeskill upgrades from the previous armor, from the little I've seen, it is that way with SoD/UF). That and from what I've heard, it is near impossible to find people to go through the flagging stuff to get to where meaningful upgrades to the PoK stuff is. 4 hour missions don't sound fun to begin with and without good groups of raiders, or nearly perfect trifecta groups of real groupers, it sounds nearly impossible to get flagged. This sucks pretty bad for flagging for raiding too (as it doesn't sound like there's any real backflag stuff).
I guess all that means is I need to get back to my job here and create some new damn magelo profiles and figure out where/how/who this stuff is gotten from.