"Except why bring a mage when you can just bring 5 rogues?"

Lets see... because we don't provide dampen magic or amplify magic. We do not provide raid consumables. Caster crafted gear is traditionally better than rogue crafted gear so its less work in the new raid zones to get the casters to a good starting point. We do not offer good AoE, FoNs is hittting for an average of 500 damage at most.

You don't bring five rogues because you have to deal with AoE trash, and CC heavy trash with sheeps. You also don't bring tons of rogues because blizzard puts in raid auras on bosses that hurt you the more melee you bring. Not only does it cause you to need more healing, but the more healer spots you need the less hybrid dps you have which means fewer raid wide buffs which means less raid DPS overall.

Lets see... Najentus has an aura that bounces between melee and causes a need for us to be manage sponge. The eagle boss in ZA. The whole phase we're pratically useless on with supremus, the whirl wind with leotharis, archimond's airburst takes out the entire melee group, doomfire blocks us from getting back in, while ranged dps (the other three 'pure' classes ) have more places to stand, and do not take a whole group with them on air burst. Bloodboil whirling around and 1 shotting melee if they don't step out when he fel enrages someone... Azgalor, how about his butt? OKAY MELEE! everyone stand over here and kill doomguards... you're contributing! *pat pat* there there... Void reaver? Al'ar (wee! exploded by his flying chicken baby! ) Gruul? (oh gee, someone didn't heal the druid up fast enough, I just ate a hateful strike!) or how about ZA's eagle boss?

Need I go on? Blizzard designs MANY melee unfriendly bosses, with stacking melee you have to stack healers and everyone loses buffs. Melee take more danger in doing their basic role than you do as a mage.

We offer the least utility out of the four pure DPS classes and are the only out of the four who can call themselves melee. We are also the only ones who didn't get nice crafted epics to keep our damage up on the way to BC, outside of a decent belt, while you all had your cloth crafting for kara, and then when you got your vortex and primals, for SSC/TK level. Then HoD crafted gear in black temple. Even being a tailor is easier, your mats drop off of monsters while to be a leatherworker I'd have to skin.

For the risk, difficulty and lack of anything nice for the raid (outside of this coming up) we should have an edge, but remember HEALING is a limiting factor in overpopulation of rogues in a raid.