First 3 heros roles

do they actually make a difference who your first 3 heros are

are they more important ??

i keep hearing poeple say that it does matter

aside beign able to flag em seperately i dont see a plus side

First three hero slots are reserved for heroes that possess skills that either need to be micro'd or are handy to have available to micro.

Strength of Honor, Prot Spirit, Spirit Bond on hotkeys for heroes 1, 2 and 3.

and this lol

Well that is the big thing, keeping your healer and protter out of harms way makes a lot of difference.

majoho said it, they're the ones you want to be able to micro out of harm's way in priority, Healers and backline.
I think you can hotkey every skills of every heroes (asumming you have the keys to do so), so anything beyond that is convention or having total control over that hero.

And they're the longest heroes to change, (have to kick them all to maintain the hero 5 = panel 5) so I guess they,re also the default you can't live without.

Only in terms of flagging. You can micro all seven heroes skills if you want, but you can only positions the first 3 by flag.

Mine are MM, prot and the Panic mes, since I don't run a specific healer hero. Instead, all my non-prot heroes have some resto or healing.

usually the ones you need out of the way or not rush in.

I have the heroes at the first positions that should attack first and whose position must be controlled individually. And the team should be positioned best if not using flags at all. Usually, the heroes are positioned around me: the first 3 in front of me, the next 2 next to me and the last 3 behind me. This is how the game sets the positioning up.

So my most aggressive heroes are at position 1-3 - usually minion master and spirit spammers, then midline with curses necros, mesmers and rangers, and at the last positions the healers.
If I attack, I first push the minion master to the front until the minions get aggro. Or I put the spirit spammers to the front and manually set the spirits prior to a fight.

How the healers organize themselves in the backline usually doesn't matter. It's not necessary to micromanage them. If I must retreat, I use the group flag anyway to control every hero at once.

I dedicated my mouse buttons to the hero flags:
thumb button #1: control hero #1
thumb button #2: remove all hero flags
tilt wheel left: control hero #2 (*via external key mapping software)
tilt wheel right: control hero #3 (*via external key mapping software)
push wheel: control group flag (*via external key mapping software)

*I use X-Mouse Button Control for this.

So, bottom line is: only the first 3 Hero slots can be individually flagged.
Other than that, it doesn't matter what "position" the heroes are in.

Am I missing something, or only the first 3 heroes can have hotkeys assigned to their skills as well? If you want to micro skills on 4-7 you have to use mouseclicks.

you can make two teams each with 4 people. Destroy 2 groups at once with the "flag". Might be useful in NM. Just an idea.

It does matter. The first 3 heroes are walking/standing in front of you, so they get into the enemy aggro first, and so they are attacked by the enemies first. So if you don't always micromanage the hero flags, it's advisable to not put the healers and suport into the first positions but the damage-dealing ones and the cannon fodder producing ones (MM or spirits).