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I'm pretty sure I removed the img tags, so that must have been a friendly moderator.

Alright since nobody else has done anything yet, I'll show you what I would do with this request - I personally like rounded rectangles more than ovals, and I added a quick dropshadow and text: http://img.ranchoweb.com/images/chiximi/quicksig1.png I also cut down the size a tad from the original since PNG format can start getting pretty big, at least as far as filesize goes. Not sure why the preview is complaining about the image link - ah well, click the link above to view

I'm not currently on a machine that has it, but as a free image editing software, I would suggest GIMP 2.6.x- it's pretty robust. MAybe not photoshop, but still quite good (my own avatar and sig were made with GIMP). Be sure to get 2.6 and not 2.7 though, since the latter is more in a testing stage; it may run into more bugs and errors. It sounds like you likely want to be cropping out the edges and then feathering (so as to get some fade in on the edges). I can probably scare something up at some point, but it may be a bit before I really have the opportunity (I.e. regular denizens of this forum, feel free to help this gentleman out)

Options I would suggest for your last two skills: Rev Tech Focus (to 31): Yes, I know that you said you don't like magic, but this would allow you to fully mod both the shield buff (warding energy) and divine protection, which is really a short term invulnerability. The latter you could eventually put in a combination with Dashing Alacrity for use for boss fights, since they can end up with about equivalent durations if you mod them correctly. If you take it to mastery (75) later, you can fully mod one other CA if you want a spell (apparently unlikely) or a ranged weapon for some of your fights (the BFG). Technically you can fully mod three CAs at 70 skill points, but at that point you may as well master the skill. To get this skill, you would first need to bump Concentration to 5 points (as that is your only skill in the same category at the moment) Warding Energy Lore: If you do the above, this would make your invulnerability and shielding buff CAs much more effective. Less important to take this if you decide to not take the Rev Tech Lore. Combat Reflexes: A solid choice for taking less hits and criticals. Combat Discipline: Less for adding more CAs to your combinations, and more to make your attacks more powerful, as it adds damage to your CAs, including Pelting Strikes. I'll ignore Exalted Warrior Focus, since you specifically asked me to Options I would not suggest: Bargaining: This skill takes a lot of skill point investment to be useful. Since it looks like you are trying to master four skills quickly already, if you choose bargaining, it will have a very short window of usefulness even if you work on getting it to max as soon as you can after mastering the other four skills. I would suggest having a bargainer character, but set them up early to be your bargainer, not late. Warding Energy Lore (if you don't take Rev Tech Lore): To be honest, if you don't focus on improving your shielding CAs with modifications taking the Warding Energy Lore is less useful than other options. Besides, without the focus, your CA levels will be lower too, making the shields less of your game plan.

Now this is something I haven't yet tried out yet (thus the caveat earlier), but I'm beginning to like the concept. Perhaps a future build for me... Oh, and thanks for the compliment, gogo

So thats a bit hard to answer immediately but I'll see what I can do So it appears your skills are: - Sword Weapons 1 - Tactics Lore 33 (did you mean 43?) - Concentration 1 - Constitution 33 - Dual Wield 33 - Enhanced Perception 5 - - - (Skill to learn at L50) - (Skill to learn at L65) So I'll assume for now that you haven't chosen two skills available to you at your level to make it more convenient for me to talk about it. So the first key to surviving Niobium is to have good defenses. It seems stupid to say, but I personally find that focusing on offense can only take you so far. Eventually you will be swarmed by enemies that hit hard (say, scorpions in the desert) and you'll find you can only kill them so fast. Plan to be able to survive a large number of high damage attacks through either damage mitigation (armor), or by having a high defense or evasion/block%. However, no matter how good your defenses are, eventually the enemy will get lucky and hit you hard a couple times in a row. Plan to be able to survive this eventuality too. You already have the major skill for the second part, constitution. Another skill that is pretty necessary is Armor Lore, as that both improves your armor as well as regen times for your CAs (or to be more accurate, it reduces the regen penalty for your armor). Finally, for Niobium I'd suggest having a bit more depth to your defensive skill selection. Your two main options that I can see would be either going the Combat Refexes route and getting your evasion %s higher, or taking Revered Tech Focus and Warding Energy Lore to make good use of the shielding buff. Shield Lore is often another good choice, but you are dual wielding, so until there is an option to have three arms, you'll have to make do elsewhere. On the CA side of things, I would highly suggest taking Exalted Warrior Focus since you seem to be pretty melee heavy. Yes, tactics lore allows you to mod your exalted warrior CAs, but you won't finish them off until L199 if you don't take the Focus. Further, focus will allow you to both reduce your regen times, and have the CAs at higher levels. Of course, I have only taken two characters to Niobium so far, so YMMV.

Its also the only way you can have a Seraphim and an Inquisitor working together, as free play doesn't care which campaign path you chose.

For something akin to a good HP regen for a Seraphim - if you have the healing CA Hallowed Restoration, the bronze mod of Recuperation is highly suggested as it gives a pretty rapid heal over time. Even if you aren't taking either of the celestial magic skills, using the CA unmodded can save you a little bit of waiting and/or potions.

From my understanding, it adds to your base damage. So for example if you are using a sword that does 70-100 damage, and slot in a 5-5 damage ring, it will improve your base damage to 75-105. The nice thing is that everything that works off your base damage (say, blacksmith runes, or +% damage: physical, for example) all will work on this base damage as well. So if you are looking for maximum damage, at some point adding +% damage will be less effective than adding base damage.

To be honest? It's a little too generalized for my tastes... were I just starting to create a shadow warrior, it doesn't really grab hold of me and say "that makes sense, I'll have to do that". We only have four of ten skills chosen, of which three are pretty much a gimme for any regular melee shadow warrior build (combat discipline being the only one I would call debatable). To make it better as a "modular" build I'd create some options for development and put them in skill groups of two or three skills. e.g. - etc. etc. I think a flexible "build" is a great idea, but it needs a little more support for the rest of the life of the character and the other six skill selections

If you are playing the campaign: are you playing the light or shadow side? If you are playing light, there should be a orc following you around - you will likely be in a cave with a locked door - if you follow the path to the right of the door, the orc should become a question mark to talk to. He'll cast a ritual which will open the door. If you are playing dark, you likely picked up some explosives. You'll need to set those (by interacting with a box) and then trigger them (by using the old-fashioned plunger thing), after which a hold should open up for you to get to the lair.

My personal suggestions are: Constitution - I can't imagine a build that doesn't have the extra hit points and eventual regen from constitution having anything but a difficult time in higher difficulty play. Revered Tech Focus - You already have the Warding Energy Lore for your shielding. I'd eventually take Revered Tech Focus to 75 (mastery), which also just happens a few points over enough skill to fully modify three CAs (Divine Protection, Warding Energy, and one other CA of your choice would be my suggestion) so that you can better utilize those shields - it will also let you have higher CA levels without penalty, which will also make those shields more powerful. [edit - removed quote of the full prior post as it was unnecessary]

Actually you need five points in any combat art skill - so if you took five ranks of concentration (for example) you would then qualify.

First, I have none of the math to back me up on this, so take anything I write after this with a grain of salt. But another factor involved in your formula is the fact that "adding runes" does not always have the same effect on regeneration time, depending on how it is done. Is a rune eaten? Is it slotted into a bronze slot? Is +aspect or +all combat art jewelry worn/slotted? All these will greatly effect that answer, and unfortunately also depend on a variety of factors (level, CA w/o penalty, focus). I tentatively put forward that lowering regen times may be better for ease of use at least, if only due to the fact that if you add/improve +combat art jewelry, your random pyromancy CA will then be effected by two increases and a decrease (+all CAs from the buff, +to regen time to the CA level increasing, - to Pyromancy from Incandescant Skin) instead of two increases and no decreases (just more damage).

I'm not personally intrested in the offer, but I would suggest stating whether you are using an XBox360 or PS3.

For Bargaining, Mastery is worthwhile (and I'm not even talking about the quest rewards). I personally saw a marked improvement in the quality of items at the merchant when I achieved mastery for bargaining. I was having difficulties between level ~60 through 74 finding the same quality of equipment that I had been previously enjoying, even though I was maintaining as best I could at least 3xLevel bargaining skill. As soon as I hit L75 (and mastery), I was once again finding +all skills rings, lightsabres, all the difficult to find items from the merchants. As for Enhanced Perception, I'm not as sure - the wiki seems to state that you are getting a better chance to find items at lower levels of the skill (which I agree with anecdotally), but I don't have anyone that has gotten mastery so I cannot say whether there is any noticable difference between the same skill levels with or without mastery

One caveat - I chose to purchase the xbox360 version of this game. I am making the assumption that the logic is the same for both systems. However that is not necessarily the case so, yes, testing is a good idea.

Hmm - I'll have to do some testing to be sure, but the couple times I've done offline co-op, I think I've figured out your portal access problem. First, while playing offline co-op, players have the choice of any portals that either has touched. So, if we take an extreme example: Player one has levelled up by killing 10,000 kobolds. Player two has levelled up by dealing with the silver main quest and is now in the druid lands. If a local co-op game is started between these characters, both players can teleport to any of the gates touched by either character (Player One could initiate a teleport to the druid forest if he wanted). Further, Player one could reactivate any of those gates just as if it wasn't active, and then he would be able to teleport ahead if he wanted when he was playing by himself. So let's say if these two continue the main plot for player two, and get to the wastelands, and it is player one that activates the gates there. If player two then goes back to his game by himself, he would not have gotten the credit for activating that portal (even though he saw his friend do so), and would have to start from druid lands again to walk to the final battles. Effectively if both players want to be able to teleport there later, they both will have to separately activate the portal. Its kind of the same as online play (both players would have to touch the gate), it's just a little more confusing because if one player touches the gate, both players see the animation for it activating, and while playing co-op both players are capable of teleporting there. That make sense?

Let me answer what I can on the bargaining at least... The benefits to bargaining (if you maintain it at a high level) are indeed significant for at least as far as I've played (through to 80, now in Niobium). I play one bargainer and one without. The bargainer has the ability to find a number of things to purchase at the merchants, most notably jewelry with good abilities (the armour and shield can be quite good too, but they fight with set or rare items). At low levels, this is mostly +All Skills and +Combat Arts. In my mid forties to fifties, I was seeing +4 or +5 all skill rings and amulets with a bargainer, but never without the skill. With the ability to wear six pieces of jewelry, and slot more into equipment at the blacksmith, this means that even a skill left at one point was actually quite effective (with an effective level in the 60's or 70's). My Seraphim had a much harder time of it - nice jewelry doesn't drop as much as I might have hoped. Now that I have the two at roughly the same level, my Seraphim benefits from the use of the Hero Chest

Ah well, that rules me out. Good luck finding a party

Oof - I never really pay attention to this power so I wasn't aware that the regen time creeps up like that. Huh - well I guess either way, whether you were able to get down to four minutes or not, DD doesn't really help for quick boss fights in succession (say - the Inquisitor followed by the four Nameless Guardian fights at the end), unless you have a lot of patience to wait out the timer. I don't know that I would suggest putting much in the way of resources to try to make the power useful once I take into account what Zinsho has said. I mean it was a little questionable before (since it wouldn't be of much help for 95%+ of the game when you are running around dealing with random quests and mobs), but not being able to keep the regen on the power from creeping up makes this even less reasonable in my eyes

Psst... you should probably state which platform you are on and your username on that system. The times you are on would probably be of help too (converted into, say GMT so that other people can easily convert their time to it as well)

AFAIK, no skill affects your divine power except divine devotion. Not concentration, not combat discipline, nothing. With that said, let's take a look at the wiki you mentioned - I can at least help with regen times for you. Looks like putting into DD would bump your damage () some unspecified amount () and cut regen times per the chart. It does not appear, however, that you will ever be able to use it quickly in succession. If you were able to get, say, all the way up to a 85% regen time cut (I find this unlikely to be easy due to diminishing returns*), we're still looking at a 3 minute regen time. Your regen time at a 200 skill (assuming 75 hard points for the mastery) would be 4 minutes, 12 seconds. Unfortunately I can't say how much your damage will spike with the divine devotion - I've not had a character yet with the skill slot free to take it, especially since I forget to use it all the time xP *looking at the expanded chart from 190-200, we see that adding ten points in DD generates a 0.4% decrease in regen times. If we pretend for just a moment that the skill is linear from 201 on, we'd be looking at needing to reach a 350 skill in DD to be able to get to a 85% regen decrease. With diminishing returns, it's probably going to be much higher than that, if 85% is even attainable with the skill.

Just to be sure, I tested the theory that the mount was increasing the penalty for buffs as well as CAs, but I saw no effect to any of Fire Demon, Grand Invigoration, or Incandescant Skin whether I was on the mount or not. Looks like the global increase to CAs only applies to cast CAs, not persistant buffs (for which I am glad).

Yes, I do believe I still have the gloves. I'll likely send you a friend request later for the trade, or you can certainly do the same as well