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

[savaughn]

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.
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I hate to drag this one back out but for some reason I had two thoughts on this that I think actually balance this a bit more, specifically on the damage of the two AoE's under consideration. The conversation was left at a 169 DPS vs. 208 DPS stopping point, but is that really what we're talking about here?

Arcane Power and Arcane Instability both increase the DPS of Arcane Explosion, moving from 169 DPS to 233 DPS. In addition to this, I'm pretty sure Arcane Explosion can crit and the Warlock equivalent can't. Let's assume a base crit rate of only 5% that is increased to 8% by Instability (obviously, Mages can get crit rates substantially higher than this). Now we're talking about 251DPS.

By comparison, I believe that Emberstorm is the only way to improve the Hellfire damage, bringing it to 229 DPS.

Now, sure this is only the first 10 Arcane Explosions, but that should still balance the scale. I should think that an 8% crit rate is pretty conservative compared to what you can get, as well.