Hero skills: is less more?

answered, ty

usually i put builds on my heroes that heroes can use well. cause, ya know... that being the smart thing to do and all. but anyways, when i feel like screwing off and playing something bad an out of the box on a hero, yes, there's usually a few skills that are disabled and i have to micro myself just because the heroes are dumb.

i think this is the question you're asking, but i'm not too sure because it seems like obvious common sense to me. but just in case, the less skills you have on a heroes bar, the more they will attempt to use said skills. if that's what you were asking. and there's lots of enchantments, really don't know where you're going with that one.
/edit: you mean like attunes? the ones with a 60 second recharge? yeah?

Yeah, what you said about making heroes cast instead of leaving them to do it with all 8/8 skills. There are some they cast a lot (eg death nova) and some they cast less (eg searing flames) even though both have fast/no recharge. So I was wondering if players know tricks that make heroes use a specific skill more often such as equipping less or using attunement/buffs like you said.

On a side note, I like to use Gwen and I give her 8x disruption skills so she can (theoretically) keep an ele/monk from casting anything for about ~12 seconds; but she ends up using about 3-4 of them while ignoring the rest. Is this typical?

I doubt anyone on these boards can give you an exact answer, but as far as my own observations of hero skill use go, each individual skill has it's own code for how and when a hero would use them.

Basically, a skill that's easy to use, or has really good code behind it, will be run well regardless of how many skills are in the bar.

There ARE skills that heroes just can't use well, regardless of how many skills are on the bar. I had this awesome pure support para that I tried to turn into a hero build. It just didn't work because I just couldn't get the heroes to use Signet of Aggression. The hero would constantly be affected by a chant, every other skill would be recharging, and they'd be holding a bundle, so they couldn't attack. Even though that would rationally be an ideal situation to spam that signet... never seen it used once.

Best thing I can suggest, it's been brought up on the boards that heroes seem to favor skills that are slotted to the left of the skill bar, so try slotting the skill there and see if they'll use it more.

In regards to Searing Flames, equip as less as possible other fire damage spells, on your fire Ele hero.
In combination with Searing Flames use Glowing Gaze, for some damage and energy, and perhaps Fireball.
With Glowing Gaze and Fireball having longer recharge times then Searing Flames u force your hero to more often use Searing Flames.

Attunements r usefull for Ele and they last long, so that shoudnt be really a problem for less casting other spells.

My fire Ele uses the same build as the Henchman Cynn in Nightfall;
Aura of Restoration
Fire Attunement
Searing Flames
Glowing Gaze
Fireball
Glyph of Lesser Energy

Or you can bind "Order hero X to use skill X" to a key, and spam that key while you do your thing.

Will force it to cast nothing but that skill if you want.

Here is a link to the Hero sub forum in guru's Campfire section. It contains all the community knows about Hero behavior and skill usage.
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/b...t10293264.html

A tip to be derived from this: don't give the heroes anything that requires synergy unless specific code was written for it. The AI won't think like a human and realise skill 1 + skill 2 = awesome. All they see are the benefits of the individual skills, not the bar as one.

Almost all my hero builds involve skills that they never cast on their own, but are useful to the grp as a whole at points. Glyph Sac + Meteor Shower comes to mind as a common one, i also often disable hero Rez skills.

So is giving a hero 4 skills total wise? probably not

Is allowing a hero control over only 4 of his 8 skills wise? it can be.

Yes allowing a hero only 4 skills might be the way to go.

I can remember getting so frustrated at VEKK for not using his skills right that I gave him 3 skills and made his secondary class monk for healing breeze.

Then I though, that's stupid. So I made a monk and I mostly run now with 2 necor mm with AotL on both of them. 20 minions take a crud load of damage. while the monk heals the 2 MM.

Try that

I would assume that the less skills they have, the more often they will use the only ones they have left. Instead of reducing the number of skills on their bars though, you can maintain a bit more flexibility by turning off (shift-click) the skills you don't want them to use. Then you can either micro-manage the disabled skills and/or re-enable them when useful.
I have noticed though that, AI being somewhat limited, Heroes will tend to use their lowest energy skills during a battle, once their initial pool of energy is used up. Especially if they have low energy, fast recharge skills. So, if you want them to use certain skills more often, it might help to put the skills on the left of their skill bar (I'm not sure that matters) and make sure there's not a bunch of other skills they can use easily/faster/sooner.

The hero AI uses pre-made categorized lists of what skills fit what situations. When situation X arises, the hero will look through the list for situation X to see which of those skills it has, pick one, and use it.

So, the first lesson to learn is not to give the hero more than one skill that fits any given situation unless you really don't care which one it picks.

Also, there is a relatively widespread belief that the hero checks its skills left-to-right, so it will always pick the left one out of two skills that both fit the situation. I'm not usr eif this is true or not.