Hasty Healer Build Trial

the problem with you anti-rebirthers (oh yeh, you have a faction now)

is that you assume your ability to keep everyone alive will never fail. News flash: It does. Lag, noobs, cast order messups, energy problems, all happen. You cant prevent it, and saying so makes you look like an idiot. Regardless of how good your party is, 1 skill is not going to make the difference between a party wipe, and keeping every member in your party alive. Absolutely especially in places like doa and fow when patrols, mobs, and bosses move about randomly.

Im not saying rebirth is even useful in mid-combat or pvp, just that I cant imagine how many times Ive used rebirth has kept my party going when a short range quicker res could not. Your argument is entirely without merit. First, you are using two straw man arguments. Monks not taking res doesn't mean the party has no resses at all, and failing to keep someone alive is not a (near) party wipe, which is the only situation where Rebirth is warranted. If you do fail to keep someone alive due to any of the reasons you gave (some of which are spurious, but I'll address that below), there are potentially 6~7 other members on the team that can res - members that are in a far better position to do so than you, the monk.

Second, ressing must be done immediately to be effective. Any res (not just Rebirth) that takes 6s to cast mid-battle is totally irrelevant, because any near-wipe situation will turn into a total wipe if you can't res quickly. One of the sure indicators of a newbie group is one where nobody hits a res the moment an ally hits the dirt. That also means skills like Death Pact Signet, FC Reschant, and Res Sigs are your absolute best res skills. None of those are ever carried on monks.

Third, monks have no free skill slots. Your assertion that one skill will not make a difference between wiping and not wiping is simply not credible, because any number of skills on a typical monk bar can and do make that difference on a regular basis (e.g., Aegis, PS/SB, SoA, Guardian, Dwayna's, LoD/WoH, Cure Hex, RoF). As such, the opportunity cost of taking a res skill on a monk bar is enormous; taking a res skill makes it significantly more likely that you will actually need to use it.

Fourth, (near) party wipes absolutely should not happen. It is possible - likely, even - that your party takes deaths. But if you are ever in a situation where you burn through 6 res sigs and still have to run away with monsters standing on your corpses, there is something else wrong with your team that has absolutely nothing to do with whether you brought a res.

Furthermore, several of the reasons you gave for taking deaths are spurious. I'm not even entirely sure what you mean by "cast-order messups", because that implies that you are casting spells in some sort of set 'combo', which is entirely at odds with what I do as a monk. But execution errors in general (e.g., activating the wrong skills, swapping to the wrong sets, healing the wrong party member) happen so infrequently at high levels of play that such situations are irrelevant, especially in PvE. Even if we assume that such errors occur at critical moments, hitting RoF instead of WoH potentially costs you a single death - it takes quite a string of screw-ups to go from single deaths to party wipes. If execution errors are occurring often enough that it's significantly affecting your ability to keep your team up, you need to practice, not bring a res.

You shouldn't be playing with "noobs" in any situation where their noobishness could actually matter. As Ensign said above, such people are entirely at odds with any area that possesses even a modicum of difficulty, and playing with such people is begging for failure. If you're willing to put yourself in that kind of situation and try to "carry the team", that's your prerogative; all bets are off. In such instances, I've gone so far as to take Unyielding Aura (see: Whammo Leash); clearly, such a situation simply isn't within the realm of serious play, and bringing Rebirth is the least of your worries.

Energy problems are within your ability to control. If you go into an area and you can't keep people up on 72 energy, either you are doing something wrong, or the build needs to incorporate more midline defense. Taking Rebirth isn't a solution in this case, because after you res everyone and keep going, you are even more likely to wipe due to most of your party having DP. The point is, fundamental issues like simply not being able to handle incoming damage due to build or player skill aren't solved by Rebirth. By definition, things get harder, not easier, after near-wiping - unless you're spamming T3h Itamz (TM) to remove DP.

Lag is the only factor on your list that is not within your direct control. Aside from simply not playing when you're lagging badly, which is merely a Hobson's Choice, there isn't a good way to account for lag spikes unless they're predictably periodic. However, this is not a persuasive reason for bringing Rebirth unless you experience severe lag on a regular basis. It's far more usual for people to experience the occasional lag spike; so to waste an entire skill slot to account for freak occurrences is an overreaction. Furthermore, lag might cause a death, but to cause a party wipe requires severe, prolonged lag, which is even less common. If you're experiencing debilitating lag on a regular basis, playing GW is essentially an exercise in futility anyway and this entire thread is irrelevant in such a case.

The topic of monks bringing res, and specifically Rebirth, is one that has been argued up and down since the game was first released. None of the arguments being presented in this thread (including mine) are anything new. As such, it's instructive to consider why prevailing wisdom is what it is; specifically, there have not, to date, been any persuasive arguments to the contrary.