/dips into his well of warlockdom and spews forth a vomit of text regarding warlocks 

Honestly, Affliction when we were raiding gruul's and SSC was
awesome As haste gear and higher item levels started getting into the
mix, the sheer amount of shadowbolts an epat geared caster can toss out
that hit anywhere from 2.5k-8.7k is quite astonishing.  In long fights
where my only job is to blast the ever loving hell out of a boss
(illidan being the obvious example) myself and dikymo (both not
tanking, both sac/snf locks) have topped the dps meters.  The only
thing that stops us is the threat cap.  With a shadow priest and a
shaman, a caster group with mixed arcane mages/bolt locks are the
powerhouses of the dps.  Oh, and eff the freakin' 40% passive threat
redux on arcane mages, eff it. 

Side note: In Hamfist i'm seeing a cool trend of the purple squares
getting love in the shaman/shadow priest groups with the arcane mages
on nuke fights.  What I kind of giggle at is the thought of an arcane
mage trying to do anything like long term massive dps without a
shadowpriest at the very least.  If an arcane mage in the tanking group
could top an affliction locks dps, I'd be very very impressed, just
from the sheer amount of mana conservation/pot chugging/gem guzzling
they'd have to do.  Most mages respec to fire or frost (from my
experience with hamfist) if they know they are/are not going to be
getting a shadow priest.  The warlocks traditionally stay with one spec
(affliction or destro) and are put wherever there's room and inevitably
there's always, always, always the call from the raid leader for "do
you run with your imp out" and I have to bid goodbye to my affliction
lock brother jester who sticks his imp down like the totem it's always
been valued for. 

To answer Dufe's Question:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHDVdjoXYIo&feature=related

So, an interesting trend has started to appear in our vent channels, nifty little things called "phantoms" they join channels silently, alert no one to their presence and provide all sorts of numlicious gossip to those who use them in channels with unwary users.

My view : This is akin to picking up a telephone in your house quietly so that you can hear what people are saying on the line. If you phantom into a channel, you know you're not part of the conversation. You didn't knock on the door to their chat. They don't know you're there. You're eavesdropping. It's rude. if you want to listen to them, go into the effing channel as yourself and not your phantom. say "hey guys, watcha talking about"? Not everything is fluffy bunnies and happy gnome punting. if they want to include you in the convo, they will, if not, they'll politely ask you to leave the channel so they can continue their discussion in private.

I'm not one to take out my frustrations in public, so sometimes I go into a private channel and complain about things that I don't really care about to people that I trust to keep their mouth shut and just listen. They know I'm not serious when I'm ranting. They know I don't mean the sometimes downright nasty things that I say because, let's face it, we all have horrible thoughts that sometimes we just need to let out in a non constructive way. I make really bad jokes that have no foundation in seriousness, but a phantom doesn't know that. A phantom only knows that things are being said about so and so.

There are only a few acceptable uses of thee phantom in my opinion:

1. monitoring a raid in case they need you while doing other things (i.e. pvping, running an instance, what have you)

2. going into a music channel as a phantom to listen to w/e the dj in there is playing.

so, I thought I'd share why as destro the RoS fight is easymode.  having a felhunter out to eat the runeshield gimps my dmg...a lot, therefore no aggro worries. in phase 1 I spend ten seconds of dps watching the rogues tanking in case they get low and need a SS.  phase 3 I'm so badly geared compared to the rest of the casters that I could probably dps without salv and still not worry about aggro.  don't know what I'm going to do about my gear/dmg, I almost feel like I'm holding the raid back.