Does the order of skills on skill bar matter?

I've been playing for 3 years, but I'm not what I would call a die hard gammer. Thus, my hours of play are not as much as I'm sure many of you. This is probably a noob question, but does the order in which I load skills on my Heros skill bar make any difference in how they use the skills?

I'm trying to do a dungeon and I need Vekk to use the Ward of Stability skill, but it seems like I always have to manually click this skill rather than the AI using it. I've tried various orders of the skills, but it doesn't seem to help. I've assigned a 9 Earth Magic so it can't be that he doesn't have any skill levels assigned to the skill.

I'm growing frustrated...sigh.

no
any order you put them in doesn't mean anything.

Unfortunately heroes are dumb, and will use skills when ever they want unless you manually make them.

Stick to clicking

It doesn't matter for heroes.

Above answer= epic fail. The order does matter left to right, with left given priority. However, Hero AI is really buggy and will give priority to those skills ANET thinks is most important, such as heals, corpse exploitation, interrupts, elite skills, ETC. Some spell types such as wards even when placed on the left side will always be ignored for other actions due to low AI priority. That is why builds such as Sabway and Discordway are so popular, they most fully exploit the AI's ridiculousness. You will have to do this manually to make it work. I also disable all of my hero rez skills due to this behavior.

Agreed dasmitchies.
Heroes prioritize skills from left to right.

if you use quick keys (1-8 instead of clicking), which is better more reliable and faster, then you should put your important skills on the left and secondary skills further right.

The better way is by pressing them and and setting them up like this 1,2,3,4,E=5,R=6,T=7 and Q=8.This is how I do it.

100% True.

This is also why heroes will not resurrect party members in-battle (with a few exceptions) until they're the only one left standing at about 25% health. Also, if you call a target, more priority is given to skills that have the most - effect on the enemy, eg. Discord & Signet of Lost Souls.

Heroes do NOT prioritize left to right. You can test this yourself, and in fact I just did. For example, make an elementalist with 9 in each attribute, and put only the 4 attunements on your skill bar. Then go outside and see which order it casts them in; it will cast them in a random order each time. In order words, when there is no external reason to cast any one skill over any other, the priority is random and NOT related to the order in which they appear on the skill bar.

It does have its own priority system of course (for example, if you put elemental attunement and fire attunement on your bar, it will always cast elemental attunement first regardless of its position; this is because the AI likes elite skills), but position does not appear to have anything to do with it, and is not a tie breaker.

I prioritize left to right, but that is because I have a Ideazon Fang (gamepad), which has 2 rows of 6 for numbers, so 1-6 are for skills I use a lot of and 7-8 are for resurrects and/or long/maintained enchantments.

But in terms of hero skills, you just kinda have to deal with it unfortunately. You can map specific hero skills to a button combo, but if you don't like pressing buttons then I don't know how I can help.

it doesnt matter but i usualy prioritize skills in combos