Is the (Shadow)Priest the better Mage in WOW?

[Skandranon]

From this, you are asserting that a) Mages are therefore useless and B) Warlocks are the undisputed AoE masters.  Neither of these claims are supported by this.
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I think we need, at this point, to distinguish between the two, mostly separate, arguments I'm making, because you've mixed and matched my points and created a bit of a straw man.

1) Mages are not useful in the endgame.

This is a versatility argument, mage versus just about everything, not just warlocks. Mages put out AoE damage, do weak single-target damage and sheep things. Just about every other class brings more to the table except the rogue. Warlock gets some attention here, but so do other classes: I talked about the things that paladins can do. My point is that mages have an extremely limited set of capabilities.

IOW, none of my points regarding Hellfire were intended to contribute to the Mages are Useless argument. You're right, when I talk about Hellfire I don't support this argument at all: I didn't intend that, and it's misleading to imply that I did. Nor was my discussion of two warlocks and two mages etc. anything more than hypothetical, and it was answering a point unrelated to either of my main arguments. I regret pointing out that a second warlock gets free AoE, because even though it's true, it seems to have distracted the attention of a great many people. Just pretend I didn't point it out, it's not supposed to be part of my overall argument.

My point boils down to this: while raiding instances, I hit four buttons only: AE, AM, Scorch, and Polymorph. Surely we can do better.

2) Warlocks can fill a mage's role adequately in groups of 5-15, to the point where empty slots are better off filled with warlocks than mages.

For your information, I do actually know a little about AoE. The collection phase doesn't in any way require movement when positioning is proper. I wasn't collecting guards in TM; they were rushing the idiot who activated them all. I moved over there to get them - the collection phase was over already. Similarly, the AoE pulls in a great many instances from Uldaman on up don't require much in the way of collection. Even in Stratholme, which is end-game, I prefer that priests shackle pull, and then I place myself in the proper position to get them all.

My point, which quickly got lost in details, was that Warlock AE damage is quite easily made adequate for primary AoE duties. Primary AoE doesn't *require* mobility, I think we can all agree. Whether mobility helps at all is actually a separate debate entirely. At the very least, we can get to the point where we can all acknowledge that primary AoE can be done well enough without having the caster move at all.

I still believe Hellfire is exceptionally powerful and can easily be made more fearsome than IAE (which, by the way, takes talent points too). But the argument about whether it's better or not is, again, separate. If the question is, can a warlock fill the AoE slot for a team adequately, I think we'll be able to come to greater agreement. I think they can.

So if they can do that well enough, then we turn our eyes to what else each class brings. Mage polymorph is humanoid CC which is excellent. Seduce is humanoid CC that is less excellent. But is it good enough? Sure. Spell Lock, likewise, is not counterspell...but it's good enough. In other words, Warlocks can fill all three of a mage's main roles. Definitely not as well as the mage can on at least two of the categories (and you may well believe on all three), but adequately well.

Past that point, however, mages have essentially nothing. They aren't better enough than Warlocks are at those three key roles. Warlocks bring soulstones and summonings for ultimate wipe recovery, healthstones which are virtually a 140 point stamina buff to the party, a variety of curses, demon/elemental CC, better single-target damage and a pick between even more stamina, a beefy offtank, more damage or the power to dispel magic like a priest. Mages can remove curses.

There are no combat capabilities unique to mages. That, in and of itself, isn't necessarily bad; if the three major capabilities were split among different classes, the package deal of poly, CS, and AoE of a mage might be attractive to fill a party slot. The problem is that the Warlock reproduces all three of those capabilities and then adds more on top of it.

My solution was to make the mage class clearly better at its specialization, AoE damage. The fact that there's reasonable debate on the topic now suggests that it's not clearly better enough. Of course, there's an alternative solution, which is to give the mage some of the capabilities of other classes, but weaker, just like Seduce is a weaker Polymorph. Perhaps we could get small resistance buffs castable on other players, or some minor form of self aggro reduction, or maybe a debuff of some kind, or perhaps a mana burn that doesn't inflict damage. There are a great many choices. However, in the current state, especially in 5-man parties, it's hard to see a particularly compelling reason to fill the slot with a mage if a Destruction spec warlock's around.