by Janet Pieterse

Created on: March 05, 2011   Last Updated: April 08, 2011

The March 2011 update introduced the Mercenary Hero as well as 7-hero parties, Embark Beach and other new features  to Guild Wars and there’s been a lot of buzz about the Mercenary Hero.

In short, the Mercenary Hero allows you to use any level 20 character on your account as a hero. It’s not free: it’s a feature you have to pay for, and you can buy Mercenary Hero slots in singles, threes, or a full set of eight. Eight is the maximum number of slots an account can hold.

Before you rush off to give Guild Wars your money though, it’s worth taking a look at exactly how the Mercenary Hero works.

To become a Mercenary Hero, that character must report to the Mercenary Registrar in any of the major towns and sign up. There seems to be no way of choosing characters from a list. In the registration process, you get to choose a personality for that hero. There are a number of options, including Born Leader, Wise, Cranky, Insane, Virtuous, Arrogant, Stoic, Humorous and others. 

Once you’ve signed up, you have a hero in your hero pool that looks just like your character, with the same name, the  same main profession, and wearing the same armour or costume. Be sure to choose which armour is showing carefully: it does not change when your original character changes armour. 

But that is as far as it goes. Other than that, the Mercenary Hero behaves just like an ordinary hero. You have to equip weapons, runes and insignia just as you do for any normal, unlocked hero. And the hero has no access to PVE skills, your normal hero builds apply.

Nor do you equip the Mercenary Hero just once. Like ordinary heroes, it has to be equipped for every character that has access to that hero. Access is account-wide, once a hero has been created, any of your characters can use it, except the character that originally signed up. That means in an account with ten characters, nine characters have access to the hero.

If you were looking for a way to comprehensively clear out your Xunlai chest, this is it!

Once your Mercenary Hero has been created, it’s not cast in stone. You can delete Mercenary Heroes and create other ones in their place. But - and it’s a big but - when you delete that hero, you delete all the runes, insignia and weapons on them as well: account wide. You may want to postpone account-wide game readiness on the Mercenary Heroes until you are sure which you most want to use. 

You  have to report to the Mercenary Registrar if you want to receive the heroes without signing that character up. This means the Mercenary Hero becomes available to any character that is able to talk to a Mercenary Registrar. The only starter area that has a Mercenary Registrar is Kamadan, so your starter Nightfall character can get a boost of level 20 heroes very early.

So while the idea of turning your favourite characters into heroes for your other characters sounds awesome, unless you want to create new characters in Nightfall, it’s just another hero. Only a much cooler one.

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