Warlocks, the item debate...

[Lissa]

I think he might be referring to the instance raid game.  I know as far as mages are concerned, it's pretty boring.  You just spend most battles spamming frostbolt, arcane missiles, or blizzard.  I imagine warlocks do a similar thing with shadowbolt after making sure curse of elements/shadow are on the target(s).
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Correct. In a raid situation, a maximum of 8 debuffs can be on a target. When you are dealing with a 5 man party in the late game, it's not hard to get to 8 debuffs, when you increase to 10 or 15, your debuffs easily get knocked off. This makes spells like Corruption and Immolate (unless you immediately cast Conflagrate) useless cause you will never get the spells to fully damage the target (plus, mobs rarely last longer than 20 seconds outside of Molten Core and Onyxia). As such, the typical Warlock in the end game is using Shadowbolt, Immo-Conflag combo, Searing Pain spam (don't recommend this one), or Drain Life. So, using Shadowbolt as a baseline isn't that far off the mark of how things go for a Warlock in the end game instances (Dire Maul, Blackrock, Stratholme, and Scholomance).