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Warlocks have roughly same base nuke as mages, but have other damage spells in addition to that.
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You don't understand how the game works. It doesn't matter how many damage spells you give a Warlock, they can only cast one at a time. Yes, even dots have casting time, at a minimum the 1.5s global cooldown.
Do you know WHY Warlocks have dots? It's not so they can "blatantly outdamage mages". It's because they NEED them to do good dps, because they have major mana issues that mages don't have. Once a Warlock uses up his whole mana pool, he needs to start casting Life Tap. Each time he casts Life Tap, he's using up 1.5s that the Mage next to him is using to cast a nuke. Even with Improved Lifetap, you only get enough mana to cast 1.3 Shadowbolts.
So basically, after your initial mana pool is exhausted, the casting time of Shadowbolt is increased by about 1.15 seconds(plus latency). This is why Warlocks who have a brain and expect to be competing with Mages at all(straight Shadowbolt spamming ones certainly do NOT compete with Mages on the majority of raid fights) use dots. A dot adds a high amount of damage for a short casting time, but most importantly, it's very mana efficient, which reduces the amount of Life Tapping you need to do.
Of course, the main problem with this is debuff slots. There are not enough debuff slots for more than one truly optimized dotting Warlock, on one target anyway. Such Warlocks vastly increase their damage when they have multiple targets, though, since DoTs are so powerful relative to their casting time, the only barrier to using them is how long it takes for them to deal all their damage. Essentially, they have a cooldown "on the target".
Mages, on the other hand, have mana gems, which increase their mana pool at no cost of casting time. Mage Armor + Arcane Meditation give you 45% regeneration in combat, also at no cost to casting time. Evocation can nearly refill your whole mana pool in 8 seconds, less than half the time it takes to Life Tap that much.
The primary distinguishing factor that makes Mages the best PvE nukers in the game is their mana regen abilities.
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Yes i do, and my remark about hunters and warlocks was based on my experience and watching DM on raids. However, it seems that different raid tend to have different classes on top for a whole lot of reasons, making it harder to compare objectively.
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Watching DM on raids tells you more about the relative competence of your players than it tells you about how good their class is. You can really only compare classes with math. It's quite easy for a good mage to be in the top 5 on DM on the vast majority of fights. In fact, in 1.11 I'd go so far as to say that there is no hunter or warlock that could possibly beat me except on a multi-target(but non-AOE) fight, in which case the Warlock might be able to, or a fight that is far more aggro-sensitive than any existing fight, in which case the Hunter might be able to.
