It's interesting to consider the tradeoff of subbing a Ranger in over the Monk or Rogue. Is the benefit of the Ranger slow proc worth sacrificing the raw DPS of the Rogue and the numerous benefits of the Monk? It's an extra 20% over Bard slow, and the Bard would obviously rather be playing something else. So... Maybe?? But then who do you drop for the Ranger? The Monk or Rogue? With three solid pullers in Pal/Brd/Rng, you can probably get by without FD. So I'd lean toward the Rogue.

The other big thing you get from Rogues is Mana Sieve, but only against stuff where you can land poison effects since their version is resistable. Still, there's probably a decent number of mobs that can only be realistically killed with a rogue or more in the group to sieve it out, I don't think bard mana drain is usually enough and none of the other melees get and mana drain as far as I know.

Ranger also adds +13hp/tick/character, a truck load of attack and some more ac.

Best off meta trio I ever experienced was bard / monk / rogue (all epic / fungi). We were all about level 56/57 or so and trio'd slabs in the hole. We never had a single second of downtime for a few hours.

Was insane xp.

So yeah, throw a paladin in there and you'd prob make less xp/hour while leveling but would add immense horsepower for killing beefier targets.

You guys keep bringing up Ranger slows … which are procs and unreliable.

Have you forgotten that bards can slow things on demand? The slow may be less than 50% but it can be applied from the very start. Bard ripping aggro isn’t really a problem anymore after the song aggro nerf

bard initial slow is ofc good when you dont have a direct healer, but ill take the 50% eventually, especially on bigger mobs

Fair enough but given the streaky nature of the slow procs my warrior and ranger has … whatever you were fighting might well have died (35% slowed) before you get that first proc.

Hard to think of anything better than monk x3 and a bard
Paladin the next most likely to include because soulfire and rez are cool

Still trying to shoehorn an SK into the group.
Prolly headed to party supplies store for more napkins.

/chortle