I prefer archery for farming. Right now I am Primeval and I farm mobs for my income, reached 230k larceny after around 3 months playtime.
There are pros and cons, I'm sure many would disagree with me in favor of mages, and they probably have a lot of good reasons, but this build works best for me, and I'll lay out my case.
You spend a lot of time running between mobs when you are farming. Primeval has more naturally built movespeed than mages, with archery passive, guild cloak, gale leather etc all geared towards movespeed. With lower quality gear, DPS is important because you spend more time killing mobs, so mage works well due to the increase in DPS from hitting multiple mobs with AOE.
Once you get good gear, you can kill most basic mobs in about 1 second more than it would have taken you to tag them with a mage to pull them in anyways.
Another reason is that you have to keep tabs on how many mobs you pull with a mage, because after 7 or 8, I can't remember which, they get a buff that reduces damage by 90%. You also have to deal with CC, if you pull mobs in that stun you, you may be getting beat to death by 8 mobs instead of looting coin purses. It requires paying more attention, and I like to be able to afk farm while I listen to podcasts etc.
I'd say in an average hour I pull in 500 purses and crates farming whalesong with a single target primeval build. A good hour may see 600 total, a bad hour may be more around 460. I'm sure there are people who pull more, and they may know better farm spots, strategies, etc than me, but I highly doubt any mages are wildly outperforming a 500 purse average per hour in whalesong, not enough to completely discount the primeval option.