I fail at descent champions

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So I put together a build plan for a shadow (I thought it'd be easiest to rank) and decided to go for it. First try, got killed at Kuduku. Go figure. Second try, ditto. Third try, I actually got past there, went into obelisks of faith, and got killed by the goatmen. By this point, I'm thinking something's a bit wrong, so maybe let's rerun the old build and see what I'm missing?

The old build was Scion, 2h ST with fire trap support, except the way I played it was actually a great deal more like fire trap with 2h ST support, at least in the early part. Every skill point went toward ST, so it made sense that it moved away eventually, but I thought why not go for firetrap? But anyway, I rolled a scion, it was easy, and I learnt something!

- I learnt that the limit of 3 traps at once is pretty annoying. I probably also spam them a little too much. And I'm pretty sure now that trap positioning is important in order not to waste traps.
- Traps of all kinds work on Kuduku, but it's a lot easier to have his minions trigger the fire trap and burn him with it.
- Freezing halls is annoying as @#$% and it's also not worth going out of my way to find the thing if I find Kuduku first. 20 movespeed avian slippers are fun though.
- Trap builds tend to leave items behind because, well, trap build, throw it down and move on. This is very annoying too.
- I really, really hate galvanic ribbons. 
- And I probably shouldn't be testing in races when I'm still a fair few points from the reward marker I want. I have slightly messed up priorities when it comes to gaming, apparently.

Most importantly, I learnt that it's good to have a cleanup aoe besides the traps, at least in early game. This should also solve the problem of leaving stuff behind. However, shadows...don't exactly have a safe and fast cleanup aoe like ST. Closest I can think of is reave, maybe that'll work? Here's hoping I can get enough points in the regular races to use D:C as testing grounds, rather than having to push hard with an old build.