Just curious what character and set up for that player would you use in the 2nd edition and why do you feel that is the best choice.

Please give your choices on experience in order as well and if you have reasons explain.

Hard to tell and depends on some factors. But i'll give you my favorite characters from my previous plays.

1- Avric / Disciple: Best healer in the game! Great skills and character abilities that heal other heroes. Survivability and good for crowd control (mace that stuns monsters). When I play him I try to gear him in a Tank/Healer and it works awesomely well especially with his skills that heal him on hits and other stuff I can't remember lol. Great Hero!

2- Reinhart / Champion: **** what a great warrior. Everytime he kills a monster he gains a Valor token and can give Valor tokens to other Heroes with the appropriate skill. Valor tokens can add a wound on an attack roll OR add a shield on a defence roll. My really close second favorite character.

3- Quellen / Runemaster: **** this dude can dish out serious pain! Blast (skill), Can add "Rune" to many weapons (skill), great DPS caster with an awesome unique ability for Fatigue regen. This dude cleared lots of rooms in our previous sessions.

Hope that answers your question!

Having all the expansions to-date, my hero party and our OL Kunzite have played four interesting epics; The Single Color challenges. With all the expansions to date, each hero color has four classes to choose from, so we decided to do epics playing with each of those colors only. We were largely unsuccessful -- Only the Four Healer quest was victorious -- but we did have to get creative with sharing all the thematic class items. This made for some very interesting finds , but the All-Mage campaign brought forth an epiphany of hilarious scale in addition to squabbling over who got the single Rune Plate in the deck.

Runemaster's Inscribe Rune skill makes for some incredibly 'outside the box' setups for your mage class. With that skill, any weapon becomes a Rune weapon. Ho hum, doesn't even add surges or damage, and often gets overlooked for the other 1XP skills. With it, suddenly all the weapons look much more appealing for our happy Runemaster, synergizing with Quick Casting and Exploding Rune to attack twice and/or with Blast in one action with such craziness as the Glaive (Blue/Red/Red/Green when using Reach, which you would do in order to get around blowing yourself up) Staff of the Wild (Blue/Yellow/Green/Green to spread conditions around) or Bow of the Eclipse / Bow of the Sky (Blue/Red/Green or Blue/Red/Yellow with auto-Pierce 2 or +1 Range respectively and each has a chance for +3 damage, with a bonus chance for Blast to spread Stun around with the latter).

Consider these unconventional options when faced with a plethora of Warrior-oriented weapons in a shop phase or have to share Rune weapons with another mage.

Personally, it's hard to say as I'm usually the overlord, but I know that a number of players on this forum consider burst mobility to be really useful. So characters like Jain Fairwood and Silhouette who can move double their speed for a single action or Steelhorns who can move monster blockades out of the way are often popular.

I tend to go for characters I like flavor-wise over actual playability (not that the characters I play as aren't great). Although I'm mainly Overlord, when I do get to play as a hero, my top picks are:

1.) Shiver (love his design so much)

2.) Zyla (fairies!)

3.) Ulma Grimstone

4.) Red Scorpion (despite her atrocious look)

5.) Avric Albright (the first hero I played as!)

The new elf bard from Nerekhall is definitely a hero I want to play as, also. I love cheeky, dandy bards.

Jain as wildlander would be my pick so far.

Syndrael and Jain become a good combo to run away from everything.

Excluding CK I really like these classes/heroes:

1. Knight for Warriors (Jain)

2. Wildlander or Treasure hunter for Scouts (Jain)

3. Apothecary or Spiritspeaker for Healers (Avric or Ashrian)

4. All mages, really ALL Mage classes are awesome (Quellen specially but Leoric or Tarha are good also)