Post-Searing Ascalon

Ascalon after the Searing is a much different beast than the world you knew beforehand. There are a number of new features waiting for you, just in Ascalon City itself, such as Henchmen, materials traders, and other new vendors, such as the skill vendor. The biggest change in post-Searing Ascalon is the inclusion of story-driven Cooperative missions and PVP-based Competitive missions.

Finding a Party

So far as the general game mechanics go, you'll find that it's not really possible to just run out into the world and kill monsters by yourself anymore. There are more monsters running around between the towns, and they're more difficult to kill, so if you go out all by your lonesome you're going to have a difficult go of it. Henchmen can help finish off some of these quests, but you're probably going to want to team up with real players for the more difficult ones.

A good party makes the post-Ascalon quests much easier to manage.

The first and probably best way to find good people to group with is to join a guild. There are plenty of guilds running around spamming invites in Ascalon City most of the time, so if you're just looking for a random guild to join, it's not too difficult to find one. It might be better, though, to make a guild with friends, either from real life or people you know online, and then schedule times to get together and do your quests. Or, if your guild is sufficiently large, you should be able to find people online whenever you need help. Just be sure to help out people of lower level than you, or you'll find your own requests for assistance falling on deaf ears.

Another way to polish off quests is to ask for teammates in the general chat of the town nearest to where the quest is resolved. It's best to ask for teammates for a specific quest, rather than typing out all of the quests you have into the chat window and hoping for tells. Since you can't link or share quests, it's just easier to manage if you get strike teams together for one quest, or for all the quests in a zone, then head back to town for your rewards and to sell the loot that you picked up.

Using Henchmen

Henchmen can be fantastic tools to finish off old quests that you never managed to get around to doing, but their weakness lies in their being just that: tools. They’re not particularly brilliant, can't adapt as quickly as human players can, and won't be able to bring all the unique skills that a human player might. That said, they still work well enough for dealing with most of the random 500-experience quests that you'll come across after you pass through the Searing, so long as you don't expect them to fight all of your battles for you.

You can hire henchmen in any post-Searing town by finding them in the city (they're always grouped together, so look for four or more green dots clumped around each other), then clicking on them and clicking on the green plus sign in your party window. You can fill out a whole party with henchmen, if you wish, or you can just hire one or two to come along with you.

Henchmen aren't brilliant, but they can definitely help you polish off some of the easier quests in the game.

Henchmen affect you as would the presence of other real players: experience is split between yourself and them, as is gold, and they'll also prevent you from obtaining massive amounts of items. Instead of items dropping and being "claimed" by your henchmen, though, as they would be for real players, they just won't drop. On the plus side, though, all items that do drop will be available for you to pick up.

Luckily, henchmen are bright enough to team up on the same target, so when you pick a target and fire on it, you can expect all of your henchmen to go for the same enemy. (Note that this is sometimes beyond even the abilities of human players...) You can use this concentration of fire to go through your targets in an orderly fashion, taking down enemy healers first, then going for the big guns.

One thing that henchmen are poor at is defending themselves; this isn't because they're not aggressive enough, but rather because they're sometimes too aggressive, especially in the case of enemies that can't really be hit. This is mostly a nuisance in areas where enemies are above or below you, such as when you cross a bridge or come up to a cliff; the enemies will notice you when you come within their aggro radius, then start using ranged attacks and spells on you, forcing your henchmen to try and find a (usually non-existant) path to the enemies, thus confusing them and diffusing your party. Sometimes you can force them to follow you by just moving ahead, but this is still pretty annoying.