Order of skills in Skillbar

I may be blind, but I can't find it in these forums: Does it matter the order of hero's/mercenary skills in the skillbar?

No, it does not matter what order the skills are in,

i.e they wount use their elite more often if its in #1 slot.

Just to make sure you don't get trolled here. There is no right or wrong answer to this as heroes AI will use the skills as expected regardless of order of skill bar. The only time you need to have say elite in no1 slot is for micro managing.


PS i've played with tons of Chinese guilds here and they don't mind what order your skill bar is only that you know how to use those skills

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Hero_behavior

It matters for keybinds, but nothing else. So it does play a role in micromanaging, but that's to make it easier for you, nothing else.

The hero itself doesn't see any difference, but there's one exception when skill order is important. It's when you use skill Arcane Mimicry.

At first I used to think the heroes would use skills more frequently depending if they were in slot 1, 2 or 3. So I always had the elite skill in slot 1. Then I watched my heroes skill bars in combat and stopped doing that

I know i've seen it before, unless they changed it or i'm going crazy, but Ithink heroes have a tendency to use skills from a left to right priority.

This was never in any way (as far as I am aware at least) proven and it was just people as usual finding patterns where there aren't any.

I believe this comes from what happens in the Augury Rock mission, where the Doppleganger will prioritize the skill use from left to right of the skill bar.
"So as this is ai behavior then it must be the same for all ai", I myself have noticed a "tendency" towards this in hero's as well. Basically you load up skills which are doubled up then head out, kill stuff and watch the hero bar. Doing this as an experiment 100's of times in the past(to answer this question before) a hero will use the left most copy of the skill 1st 80% of the time, now this is by no means conclusive that it's coded ai behavior, but it does make it seem likely that somewhere in there is the command to use them in order.