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Here's the scenario. I've got a trap assassin going, and I really like her. Experimental build, trying all the traps a bit. She's clvl 23, so no Inferno/Lightning traps.

Trap assassin, currently using right-click: Wake of Fire (slvl 4), some Charged Bolt sentry (slvl 3), for reasons I'll outline below. Left click is Blade Fury. Using a Shadow Warrior, and she's doing most of the Blade Fury casting, and I'm planting elemental traps, as is the Shadow sometimes.

The question is: What slvl is she casting those traps at? The slvl I have the skill at? Her slvl? Something out of left field? I should 'use orb'?

On to the little notes I've found. Wake of Fire will not go off the playing field. Won't go into the rivers in Act 3, or out in space chasing specters in the AS. Charged Bolt, however, will. I used it in the AS a lot, and also in the Act 3 jungles to kill the water beasts, or to plant on log bridges, as Wake of Fire doesn't work worth crap there.

That's all I have for now. I may add insights to this later. I don't really need build advice, as there's plenty of that around. As I said, this is a 'try-out-the-trap-skills' char.

--Mav

I have been playing around with Shadow Warrior (SW) quite a bit in single player, and have made some observations, specifically from the point of view of using the SW in conjunction with a traps assassin. Note these are all empirical, so don't expect any hard numbers.

The slvl of the skills your Shadow Warrior skills uses increases only with points in Shadow Warrior. Presumably the same holds for Shadow Master. Player clvl and player slvl in other skills does not seem to matter. This is most easily observed by activating a trap whose effect increases in range with increasing slvl, such as Wake of Fire or Lightning Sentry. Note that it may not be a 1:1 map; a slvl 20 Shadow Warrior using Dragon Tail only looks like it gets 2 kicks, so the formula could be something like SW skills slvl = (SW slvl / 2).

For a traps assassin, one way to try to get some use out of your left mouse button is to map it to a skill you want your Shadow Warrior to use. Note, however, that no matter skills you map, your Shadow will tend to jump into melee whenever it feels like it; this seems to depend mostly on (a) how close it is to a monster, and (b) how close the player is to a monster. Also, even if you map a melee attack skill to the left mouse button, the Shadow will not use it all the time. The possible skills you can choose from are any martial art attack, and the traps Fire Blast, Shock Web, Blade Sentinel, and Blade Fury. Here's some specific examples of skills you might choose:

- Fire Blast or Shock Web: the SW will tend to throw these more at range, but will sometimes throw them when up close. Shock Web is handy if the SW throws it in melee since it will do damage while the SW continues fighting; also, it can be stacked.

- Blade Sentinel: the SW will use this, but it's not very itelligent about where it throws the Sentinel to. Typically it will aim the blade at wherever the monster it's targetting currently happens to be standing, however close or far away that is, whether the monster is moving in an appropriate direction to get hit by the sentinel or not.

- Blade Fury: As far as I've been able to determine, this option is broken. Firstly, the SW always throws exactly one star per cast. Secondly, even if that star hits, it does not do any damage! It's not a case of the damage not showing up on the monster's health bar, as whenever the player uses blade fury, it works correctly.

- Martial Arts charge-ups: On first glance, you would think that these are not really useful, giving only an AR boost (assuming your RMB is reserved for traps and such.) Bear in mind, however, that the SW will often use a normal attack regardless of what skills you have mapped, so any changes your SW builds up will at least some of the time be released before the timer expires... you just have no control over when. You can improve the odds of this happening by micromanaging your (shadow's) LMB and switching to a normal attack or a kick. For a traps assassin using SW, the downside is you need to put a point in at least one skill that you personally will probably never use.

- Martial Arts finishers: The SW will occasionally use a finisher instead of a normal attack. Any will work, with the exception of Dragon Flight. DO NOT LET your Shadow use Dragon Flight, it will get you killed! Dragon Flight will teleport your Shadow into the thickest fight it can find -- and you along with it! If you're unprepared this can come as quite a shock, and even if you are prepared is usually not a good thing. As with charge-ups, for a traps assassin putting a point in a martial arts finisher that you personally will never use seems a bit of a waste. Dragon Talon only takes 1 skill point and at high slvls is pretty comparable to Dragon Claw; Dragon Tail seems a bit of a waste since you already have access to lots of fire through your traps, and since Fists of Fire only takes 1 skill point.

As for what to map to the RMB, this is typically the purview of the traps assassin, not the SW, since this is where most of your offense will come from. Your SW will use traps mapped to the RMB from time to time, of course, but don't rely on it. I'll only mention one set of skills you might want to use with your SW that can only be mapped to the RMB, and those are the Burst of Speed/Fade/Venom line. Especially with Venom, as with it you can get a pretty decent poison attack on your SW for 1 skill point (3 if you count prereqs.) Note that Venom does not work with kicks, so that's a point in Dragon Claw's favour if you want to map a finisher to the LMB. Of course, there's also Mind Blast, but it's bugged, and then you won't be casting traps while using it...

Hope that helps. If I do some more experimentation, I'll post the results.

Cheers,
Zed.

Other than that I'd have to say it sure seems like my SWs (at slvl 1 since I only ever put 1 point in them) never casted anything over slvl 1, while my higher lvl SMs sure seem to be able to cast higher slvl spells even for skills I have no points in.

Hmmm ... I remember reading a testing report that specified the shadow warrior's skills as equal to skill points invested by the player and the shadow masters skills as equal to the skill points placed into shadow master divided by two.
To be honest, I find it more fun to learn from personal experience, but I thought I would let you or any interested testers know what I have heard so far.

EDIT: for warrior ... I mean equal to the players level.