capping elites in preparation for NF heroes

Hey, when NF comes out and I get my heroes I want to be able to give them the best skills possible. I already have an elem, a monk, and a necro, so I have plenty of skills there. However, for the rest of the classes, I am not too familiar with them, and I would like to know what essential elite skills I should try to get for them. I am probably going to make an axe warrior, so I will capture Cleave and Eviscerate...the other professions, I have no idea what I should get...any help would be appreciated, just try listing 1 or 2 elites per profession..thanks!

Yeah Ive been capping any Faction Elite Ive come by, I pretty much have every Propechies elite unlocked already. It was funny during the WPE my heroes had elites and I didnt... lol.

It depends on what roles you want your heroes to have. Just go to www.guildwiki.org and look at some builds. You can get some ideas of how your heroes should be set up from there. If you really can't figure out how your heroes should be set up on your own, then maybe you should just stick with playing with other people or use altered henchmen builds.

Warriors:
Gladiator's Defense - it's foolproof in that your heroes won't cancel out of it like they would pretty much every other defensive stance.
Eviscerate - Axe warriors are going to make the best W heroes because their Deep Wound is unconditional. Do you really trust Koss to only land a Gash on a bleeding enemy or Crushing Blow on a knocked down one?

Rangers:
Barrage - unconditional mass damage, gets the nod on fire-and-forget grounds.
Broad Head Arrow - easy Daze in PvE, a very helpful skill.

Elementalists:
Elemental Attunement, Second Wind - The only two elite energy management skills I can imagine being used to good effect by heroes. Something like Glyph of Energy would be useless (they'd blow it on a Flare), and I don't trust them with Ether Prodigy.
Blinding Surge (Nightfall) - An easy way to give yourself a Flashbot. Only requires ~5 points in Air magic to be useful.

Monk:
Blessed Light - highly reusable hex/condition removal makes this a great utility tool.
Glimmer of Light (Nightfall) - the near-instant recharge means you can make this the only "pure" heal on your monk's bar and fill the rest with utility.
(In practice, a lot of hero monks will be best off with Energy Drain on a Me secondary)

Mesmer:
Energy Drain - the best elite energy management available to them (since you can't really trust heroes to manage Mantra of Recall well).
Psychic Distraction - yet to be tested, but the idea of an infallible interrupter with 2s recharge is pretty tempting.
Ineptitude - easy high damage.

Necromancer:
Spiteful Spirit - the best area damage in PvE, it's reasonably foolproof in fire-and-forget terms. An SS necro is also more party-friendly than an MM would be.
Blood Is Power - can you honestly tell me your elementalists aren't tingling with excitement at the idea of a pet battery necro of their very own?

Ritualist:
Not a lot of great options here. I'd have to say Wanderlust for general fun use, maybe Spirit Channeling/Attuned was Songkai for energy? Ritual Lord doesn't sound like a good idea - I doubt Heroes will be able to manage their energy well enough to run spirit-spam-on-recharge.

Assassin:
Temple Strike - If you're going to run a 'sin over a warrior, you may as well give him the tools to be genuinely good at shutting down that single target he's going to go after.
Flashing Blades - on the other hand, maybe it's a better idea just to help him stay alive!

Dervish:
Reaper's Sweep/Wounding Strike - may as well maximise the use of those AoE Deep Wounds.
Sandy Grip - or AoE Blind, I hear that's also pretty nice.
Any Avatar - for coolness value.

Paragon:
"The Power is Yours!" - who cares if he gimps himself, if he's feeding the rest of the party?
Cautery Signet - handy, especially since your hero monks will actually be able to bring condition removal to strip the burning!

+1 point to paperfly

I'll flush out some other things for the warrior
If your going to make the warrior a hammer. erranged smash with a few other adren skills then. an annoying trait that all warrior henches have is when they get aggroed they use shouts.
Dwarven battle stance is great but again its kinda like the puppy thing with the shouts.
Axe skills
Exercite is good for a deep wound but your little pet might take about 15 hits to get up there. if your good at maintaining agro on him triple chop might be funner.
Swords
Normally I dislike them but you could get away with tossing any on and hope it works as intended.

Assain palm strike and few other skills and hope your assain dosen't mess up the combo.

I'm surprised nobody has brought this up yet. Skull Crack. Hands down, one of the best elites for a hero to have.

thanks a lot paperfly, and everyone else....I mean, I've had GW for over a year, but have only become really comfortable with my elem, necro, and monk...and I doubt there's many people out there who right away will be able to set up builds for every hero, so i think this thread helps

I would recommend getting (excluding chapter 3 skills):

Hundred Blades, Triple Chop, Eviscerate, Earthshaker, Auspicious Parry, Barrage, Blessed Light, Offering of Blood, Animate Flesh Golem, Blood is Power, Tainted Flesh, Energy Surge, Migraine, Ether Prodigy.

Peace,
-CxE

ah, finally a use for my balthazar faction!!! (I dont have any warriors so I have NO warrior skills unlocked, but I have tons of faction ---will need a good list of basic axe skills to unlock, <talk to guildee>)
thanks for the idea!

Gladiator's Defense is definitely worth while for a tanking hero. Give him a knockdown + "On Your Knees" + interrupts + a few ripostes for some serious fun

Well, I didn't play a Ritualist in PvE much so I only have the basic spirits and stuff unlocked and was thinking about unlocking a lot of rit skills before Nightfall but I really don't think I'll be using a rit hero that much if not at all so I've just been working on farming gold.

There are a few good Ritualist Elites that are easy for the AI to figure out.

Attuned was Songkai for Restoration and Channeling Rits
Preservation for Restoration builds
Xinrae's Weapon Great for Communing Builds (Nightfall)
Weapon of Remedy another option for Restoration Ritualist (Nightfall)
Spirit's Strength easy enough for the AI to understand if you give your HERO weapon spells.(Nightfall)

Where are y'all finding Ritualist heroes?

Communing is basically useless as a secondary without high Spawning Power, plus you don't have Ritual Lord. I can see maybe a secondary Channeling or Restoration hero, but there really aren't that many great builds for rit secondaries.

I'd add Charge to the list for a warrior hero, no harm in having a group speed buff, also, for an axe warrior i always liked triple chop as an option
and escape for rangers is a good no worries addition to a build as it makes your hero fast and alot tougher with the 75% chance to evade.
when lina from GW:P used Shield of Regeneration, that was always useful in a pinch so having it available to a hero would be equally useful if not more so.
that's all i can think of for now.

4 toons, every single skill in prophecies and faction unlocked by playing pve...
wish there was a title for that, but i don't need to cap or buy anything just for the heroes

Actually Ai is pretty good with the conditional deep wound skills, for example, Koss would only use crushing if counter blow actually knocked down and even used it if i knocked someone down. Also the things outside of harvest temple, (forget their name) only use gash on a bleeding foe.

I tried ViM on Koss in the preview event. Since the two new classes are extremely condition heavy, and Koss as a W/Me kept on spamming Epidemic, he had a survivability rate far exceeding my expectations.

Paperfly makes some good points, but i think he is underestimating the AI of the heroes. During the WPE, i would have given my heroes the skills Paperfly posted for the same exact reason. But again that was only a preview and i think i heard somewhere that the devs were improving the AI of heroes and thier use of skills. for all i know monk heroes could be using mantra of recall the right way and eles using ether prodigy could be spamming heal party before ether prodigy ends.

Just because there improving the ai of a hench dosen't mean there going to get smarter. Mheblo going ahead of a warrior in battle is always fun.

Warriors:
Pretty much any elite you can get, either an attack skill or a easy-to-use stance.

Elementalists:
Elemental Attunement is probably best for any kind of nuker. Mind Blast or Ward against Harm, maybe

Monk:
I thought Blessed Light was even too much energy. So get a few things that are cheaper, just in case.

Mesmer:
Psychic Distraction - haven't tested it, but I would get this first.
Power Leech - in addition to Power Drain.
My monk had no problems using Mantra of Recall; he used it perfectly. On the other hand, he spammed Flesh Golem every chance he got.

Necromancer:
Blood Is Power - this will be nice if it works. If the hero waits till you're under 10 energy the way Eve does, it will be wasted.

Quite possibly. I'll admit that I'm not too interested in managing my heroes directly, so I've focussed fairly heavily on fire-and-forget skills. It's probably a good approach for relatively new players, too - but if you know what you're doing, then by all means experiment with more complex stuff!
I tested it over the preview weekend. Generally speaking, they'd use it if I slipped under 15E, which is borderline IMO.

The other concern is how suicidal they are - I tested by spamming enough skills to keep myself at 0-10 energy for as long as possible, and the hero (on the Defensive AI set) would continue casting BiP on me until they were reduced to 25% of their maximum health, but no lower. Nothing I tried (with any mix of health-sacrifice spells) would induce them to go lower than that, but of course under pressure going down to 25% can be suicidal anyway.

The final option is to disable it in their AI autocast settings (it's been confirmed in one of the previews that we'll be able to do this - no more wasted res sigs!) and only use it "manually" through their command window.

...Incidentally, I noticed that the hero would virtually never use BiP on other heroes or henchies, only on me.