A request for a Warlock

[Lissa]

Two.

Three with talents, but two of those three are simply unusable in most situations, and one of them offers significantly less DPS than just about any other spell in the mage's arsenal.

Actually, you have 6 instants. You have Fire Blast (normal spell), Cone of Cold (normal spell), Arcane Missiles (talent for no interruption), Arcane Explosion (talent to make instant), Frost Nova (normal spell with very low damage, really a root), and one other spell that I saw that was on a ten minute cooldown like Death Coil.

Actually, there's only one vulnerability power for mages, and that's Improved Scorch, which requires five applications of a low-DPS spell and an application once every five seconds thereafter to keep up.  Your vulnerability talent requires just a crit shadowbolt.

The Warlock has Suppression, Improved Shadowbolt, Shadow Mastery, and Pyroclasm.

The Mage has Piercing Ice, Fire Power, Arcane Focus, Improved Scorch, and Arcane Power.

Yes, and just how much soloing do we do at this stage of our level 60ness?  Attacking a tanked mob, even assuming that I can use fire, my best damage is chaining fireballs with a fireblast every now and then.  Cone of Cold if I don't have to worry about breaking CC.  Chain shadowbolts are less than this, certainly, but the moment you crit once, you have +20% damage on your next four shadowbolts.  I can crit once and get about 400 more damage on ignite, which is something like 50% of another fireball.

So let me get this straight, your Ignite does half another fireball. Is this with +damage gear or without? If without, you're saying your fireball, without damage adders is doing average of 800 or my shadowbolt that does an average of 500, a 300 point difference (this is without me putting on damage adders). This means that my next 4 shadowbolts (barring something wacky from CoS) is going to give me roughly 400 more damage on that +20%. It's effectively the same damage Skan.

You also have a lot more available in the other trees if you want to go down those roads. There are several talents in Cold that will boost damage and crits without requiring the mob be frozen. There are also a number of talents in Arcane that will both lower the resistance of the mob to Arcane spells and boost damage. I bet if I sat down and looked at the Arcane and Frost trees I could make a build that is similar to the Warlock's SM/Ruin build between those two trees.

And let's not even talk about the sustainability issue.  You can go on shooting those shadowbolts forever with bandages and lifetap: I shoot myself dry in about a minute and a half.  I can evoc back about 5k mana, but even if it's available I'm reduced to wanding and hoping for Judgment of Wisdom procs after two and a half minutes, max.
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And if I lifetap and bandage, I can get killed (as happened a couple times now on Onyxia raids, I tapped down 2000 and immediately got hit by two fireballs before I could get bandaged up and died). Lifetap/Bandage is great if you know you're not going to take any damage, but anytime you're dealing with a large AoE attack or random attacks (like you see from MC bosses and Onyxia), you could end up dead. The last couple attempts we made at Onyxia, I made sure my DoTs were up and I then wanded when I got low on mana.