While it's always a good idea to double check your play style, the biggest contributor to the problem has nothing to do with you. All the stone creature mobs have a huge armor debuff power that will kill you nearly instantly. They'll hit you with it, but you have no idea you're hit (there's no icon indicator for it). If you happen to look at your stats, though, you'll see your armor has been reduced about 80 or so points and your health and mana regens are negative. Even if you have BSM gear or the new 77 set on, that much lost armor means you're fighting with the equivalent of L60 gear on, and you're also not getting any healing to boot.
This combo combined with no warning that it has happened means you don't know what's going on until you're suddenly losing health in tremendous chunks. You have maybe a second to react before you're dead, so there's pretty much nothing you can do. Even hiding behind tanks doesn't work because you'll still eventually be hit by this debuff, and the tanks will die to it too leaving you exposed. And since tanks can't hold aggro over int mages with their high damage output, the bad guy focus will hit you pretty quickly. The only thing you could do is stay so far back that you're always out of their range, but this means you aren't actually able to help the party at all (aka leeching).
So to answer your question, no, there's nothing you can do to avoid racking up deaths in the caverns with an int mage. I hope STS will tone down the ludicrously powerful debuff, but the longer it goes the less hope I have that the place will ever be playable by int or dex characters.
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