Guild Wars.

[Wyrm]

The Stone Summit... Necromancers... Have nasty health-stealing skills that they use when they are injured - so, kill them last.

Stone Summit Howlers are the necros. And yes, Vampiric Touch and Soul Feast (corpse skill) are annoying.

The rangers and warriors deal average damage. The Snow Ettins deal quite a lot of damage.

The Stone Summit warriors that use axes will use Distracting Blow when it's available to them, which is a real pain if you're casting constantly.

The order in which I kill them:

Dolyak Masters
Stone Summit Sages
Snow Ettins
Beastmasters
Rangers
Warriors
Necromancers

I agree for the most part, except I've always wanted to take out the necros after the mesmers since leaving them to the end always ensures them of quite a few corpses with which to (basically) spam Soul Feast.

Each level is +20 health, and a few attribute points. Insignificant. What skills you have access on will make the biggest difference, character-power wise, and the tactics you use will have to make up for the rest.

True, but if you can get your Marksmanship score up to as close to 12 as you can early on, you'll deal a lot more damage on a consistant basis. I've found it more desirable with a low level character to get the weapon attribute as high as possible and worry about the secondary skills later. This is a bit harder for Rangers, as before you really settle into a build, you'll find yourself spreading points across 3-5 attributes, depending on your current build. However, now that they're on the cheap again, you can buy minor Runes in Ascalon to help out with attributes early on.

Note - Althea's Ashes is a special case. It's a very, very evil level design. It really is. I once again implore you to return later.

I really don't know why everyone has so much trouble with this quest. I did the quest with just myself and one other person, both of us around level 10-15, and only died a couple times when we got stupid (and this was early on in my GW experience before I actually knew what I was doing). If you try to rush in head-on, you're more than likely going to fail unless you bring people with their 20s and high end armor/skills. If you take the side paths you can avoid more than half of the Charr in the area.

Don't be afraid to buy it - I do not believe any of the skills there can be gotten for free through quests.

You're right. None of the skills at the out-of-the-way outposts can be aquired through quests. Bear in mind though, that if it's an outpost you're taken to as a part of the game storyline (i.e. Yak's Bend) then you can get the skills in quests.

Henchmen AI is set up so that they will focus fire on the most recent target of a player. That means that if you switch targets, they will too. It also means that if you're playing with someone else that targets something other than what you are, you can get them to target with the other player. You start attacking your enemy, then the other person starts attacking theirs. As long as neither of you switches targets, the henches will stay locked on to the other persons.

There are times further in the game where the henches ability to focus fire will be better than grouping with players who can't stay on target.

Speaking of AI, the enemy ai will target whoever has the lowest armor level and stuff like that. There's actually some pretty good posts on the RB forums about AI targetting in the "Random notes to help new players" thread. You'll just have to scroll to near the end of the thread (although there's some good advice throughout the whole thing) to find it.

I know it's been said before, but this is not D2. You can't just max Blizzard and it's synergies, and steamroll through the game, teleporting past anything that's Cold Immune.

I haven't left to my knowledge, although I haven't found too many helpful faces, either.

Eh... the few times I was online at the same time you were, you didn't say a thing on the guild channel. Yes, there are a few people in the guild who generally stick to themselves and won't say much of anything, but I've never had any problem finding someone to do something with. My warrior skipped all of the early missions and is now going back through them all to get skill points (while using the time to experiment with builds). If you don't mind me powerhousing through most enemies (some people like their first run-through to be sans high level help), I'd be more than willing to go through them with you.