Still a noob

Okay, so I got this pretty new slave, best one I have so far, I haven't had any exceptional fighters in this game, and you probably won't even consider this one exceptional Record:
69-17-6, but I do because it's the best one I have so far, her name is Shirley and she is a war gladiator. This is her stats*without items and with items*:
81 str 68 intel 71 agility 74 stamina 70 size 73 presence 55 chi
97 str 70 intel 82 agility 76 stamina 72 size 78 presence 64 chi

as far as fight strategy goes, she's really active and blood thirsty, she's level 20 and she just got her weapon skill maxed to 10, now what I can't figure out is what skill to max out next, I want death from above because I love the sound of it, but it says it's for the biggest fighters, and she's not one of the biggest. Looking over the skill tree's, I have absolutely no idea what to decide on, considering devistating power from rage also.

DFA is a great skill for any war glad, so go for it :)

Devastating power is also fine for a strength heavy glad :)

I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong, Shirley is now level 38, she has her weapons skill maxed, it's for two handed weapon, death from above maxed, battle hardened maxed, and war cry at level 5. Her stats with items and achievements are as follows: 118 str, 71 intel, 86 agility, 82 stamina, 81 size, 82 presence, and 79 chi. Her weapon is a two handed axe that does around 400 damage, and her win loss ratio is 196-102-14. Now I went to do the hard mode of the gauntlet, and no matter what partner I have, no matter how I change my fight strategy, I loose every try. To make matters worse not only do I loose, but it seems like Shirley doesn't even get a hit in. I tried changing items so that she has a huge agility instead of strength, and it doesn't make an effect, she still gets a hit in if she's lucky, she gets hit like seven times first IF she gets A hit in.

I need someone to give me a hint, because I'm doing something wrong, my activity level is 10, but it doesn't seem to matter.

How high is her encumbrance? That may be part of the problem.
Please note that 2H wars in general don't do terrific in the gauntlets harder modes because they tend to hit later than most opponents meaning a huge variety of effects caused by crits or skills can occur to them and she doesn't have even half of her skilltree full yet. Hard isn't called hard for no reason and Nightmare is a fitting name for that difficulty, you should take those into consideration aswell :p

encumbrance 12 percent, the highest any of my glads have is 16 percent right now

Try to get some heavier armour, going by the fact that he is at 12% im assuming you are using mostly light armour with some medium (maybe 1 or 2 heavy) armour.
Try to get balance it atleast in the 20-25% encumbrance range. If you are going to fight with 12% encumbrance you might aswell have made him a 2H rage :)

alright, shirley now has some descent armor, her encumbrance is now 28 percent, her stats changed a bit, here's her stats with items:

118/74/88/94/79/83/80

she's level fourty, also i made a mistake, i went after warcry, i was told that was dumb, so i used skulls to take it away, i had it up to level six :/ now im going after armour movement

a little less agility, but a little more stamina


Record:
220-113-14

No worries everybody has to go through a learning curve that never stops :p
Instead of using trophies (skulls) you could also use training points to untrain, this works exactly the same as training a skill so each succesfull untrain chips off 1/10th of the skill.
To untrain hold U and click the skill you wish to untrain.