Locks and what happened?

Go look at the numbers for a fight like Northrend Beasts. Jaraxxus is off because of Spellsteal. Faction champs are faction champs. Twins has a lot of buffs. Anub'arak rewards characters who can AE well.

But if you look at Northrend Beasts, you'll typically see a lot of mages, rogues, locks and hunters all at the top of charts, with the occasional Feral druid or DK. Your mileage will almost certainly vary. Gear, raid synergy, latency and player skill play into those numbers a great deal. Unless you are one of those players routinely putting out 8000 dps on 25 heroic Northrend Beasts, you'll probably see a bigger increase just by improving your own performance than you would see if we just buffed you across the board.

Now make no mistake: the specifics of the encounter matter a lot. It's hard to look at almost any boss and call that a "normal fight" given the diversity and mechanics of the encounters. If you dismiss most of the bosses as I just did above, then you're culling through your data set quite a bit. The more you eliminate data points the more skewed your results could potentially become. I'm just trying to caveat anyone looking at a list of numbers and concluding based on that alone that your class is too high or too low. Doing dps is a lot more complicated then some players give it credit for. If it was not, you wouldn't see nearly the volume of theorycrafting debate that you do.

Q u o t e:
I've generally found that warlock AOE is pretty much on par with arcane mage AOE in terms of damage output when going all out. Both Rain of Fire and Blizzard are quite capable of delivering damage. The problems with warlock AOE are:

Threat - if a warlock gains aggro during AOE its soulshatter or die. In contrast, a mage has iceblock, nova and invisibility. Also with mirror image out a mage can begin AOE immediately with all cooldowns without fear of aggro. In contrast, a lock generally has to wait for the tanks to get aggro. The biggest reason why warlock AOE may lag other classes seems to be the threat issue.

3.3 damage caps - from what I've heard it sounds like death knights might be the only real AOE class come 3.3, because their pestilence is unaffected by the 10-target damage cap.

We buffed Seed for 3.3 so that Affliction could gravitate towards it instead of Rain of Fire. We also improved the lock threat management talents. With that said, we think warlock AE is probably fine. DK AE is generally fine from Death and Decay et al., but yes massive Pestilence use can give them really high numbers and is not an easy thing to fix through damage caps.

Unrelated, I liked a lot of what Enthorn said too.

Q u o t e:
It's easier to balance tanking around encounters, more difficult to balance DPS classes around it. Each tank spec needs to have the tools to survive the encounter. Introducing mechanics in a fight that favors one DPS over another is fine, when those mechanics buff one class a lot more, it doesn't make sense to balance around that outlier. Right now, a lot of ToC is an outlier that has become the norm, will that norm continue in ICC?

We do balance around encounters. In the same thread, I used the specific example (based on having just read this thread) that few locks would probably feel awesome if their dps on target dummies was 12K but they never broke 6K on actual encounters. For most of us, the encounters are all that matter.