I've never seen a pet that I couldn't pull aggro off within a few seconds. You might be better served to use the root pet or just tank it yourself. Of course, I've never duo'd with a mage with the intention of the pet tanking, so others might have better insight into how that works.
I think you'd probably get your spells faster just grouping in the wos cubby (5 way) or mpg blind/task or riftseekers statue camp.
This is a recent thread about farming 69-70 spells
http://crucible.samanna.net/viewtopic.php?t=2525
How I got my zerker oow runes was to box him out of group. Your shaman will get invited pretty easy, and just bring the mage along and nuke out of group.
If you play at odd hours/prefer to solo, I'd probably look into nobles causeway or rcod named. There are tons of threads about those places. Just search here, or go to everquest.allakhazam.com and item search for 'muramite rune' and look over the list of named that drop them in rcod/nobles.
Other option is going to DoD for runes. But I've never done that, but I know there are some threads on DoD runes around the forum.