The Shadow "knows"

[Crystalion]

This is going to change my strategy for my grenadier variant (my main skill is a synergized fire blast) somewhat, as I was planning on getting a one point master to help tank, but now I think I'll put more into Warrior so the 1/3 part helps her out more.

On topic: Amazon Basin Shadow Master AI question thread, recently started. The first reply there matches my (limited) experience. I personally believe that Masters can be influenced, just not as obviously as Warriors. More info on this from practictioners and code-readers would be helpful.

I'd also have linked to one of the good monequip.txt explanations, but I can only find the one for Valks, not Shadows (I remember the explanations myself, but it would take too long to type up). In short, the Master, at higher slvls, gets much better random equipment than a Warrior. However the Warrior gets that nifty +armor% factor from skills.txt. Neither matter much if you're keeping them both out of melee, I suppose (well, resists on the armor, eh?)

I should point out here that the value of using a shadow vis a vis resists can be high, because, if they have Fade up, you'll get her to be quad immune at reasonable slvls (slvl*4 resist f/c/l/p, to 75 for warrior, diminishing returns formula to 85 for master). Since you can "force" a warrior to put up Fade, you can pretty much plan a build where only physical and magic will hurt her (edit: and open wounds, and ? ;) ). If you manage to keep her out of melee and use CoS to stop ranged attackers, then she is probably not going to be dying very often. :)

Of course, at regen 3 (vs. the Master's 2) a warrior will recover from physical and magic damage pretty rapidly (though nothing compared to a valk!). Tempting to use her as a tank... So the question of whether she can be made to cast Fire Blasts while in melee range of monsters is important. I suggest experimenting with blade fury on left mouse and fire blast on right, then directing BF at a target that is not next to her to cause her to redirect her efforts while she probably remains in place like a psuedo-valk/tank.

Another factor there is that Shadows have base 40% physical resist, iirc, so it only takes them slvl 10 fade for them to max. their physical resist at 50% (assuming they are affected by that cap, that is).

Seems to me that though making an uber-valk build is straightforward, uber shadow builds have more potential.

As I've said, lots of questions and research left on this general topic!