Looking good. I'm glad you got it working-- My one piece of advice is to perhaps change the color scheme. The geometry of the model is fine, but the texture colors could use some adjustments to make them stand out a little bit more.

I would also go with a different name :P Sounds a little tacky.

It's probably that you didn't apply the bones to your model correctly. Make sure you did this correctly, and re-export the model.

Select the UVs that overlap and then hit "g" then "mmb" (middle mouse button) to lock the motion to a certain axis. Type in a number like 500 and hit enter. This will move it 500 units away. Bake your model, and then move the UVs back to their location using the method above but use -500 instead.

As long as it's topologically a rectangle, you can make it into an exact rectangle by selecting a row of vertices (on the UV screen) and pressing "w" > "align Y". Do this for each set of vertices in the rows, and repeat for the columns using "align X".

http://i.imgur.com/LrgqL.jpg

The middle part can be unwrapped like any old cylinder (2 seams at the top and bottom + 1 along the side). The blade can be projection unwrapped (2 projections, one from each side). The end portion seems to be a combination of quads and tris for some reason. This complicates the unwrap, if you can remake it to only be quads it should unwrap like 2 cylinders.

I think it looks pretty good from in-game, but something about the brightness of the edge in the close-up view makes it look a little odd. Other than that, I think it looks good.

If you go to this site[wyksblog.com], it will tell you how to decompile models. The decompiled models usually come with the animation .smds which you can import into blender. My knowledge stops there, though, since I don't work with animating.

I think there is a way, but unfortunately I do not know myself. :(

Visually I would thicken the blades (both in terms of depth and width). It would help with readability from afar. For instance, it looks great in the up-close screenshot, but the in-game view makes the blades seem like paper. Otherwise good work.

Oh, that must be either a problem with your masks or the lighting in that pose. Perhaps give the gems a selfillum mask. It should be the alpha channel of your mask1 texture. Paint those parts white.

http://media.steampowered.com/apps/dota2/workshop/Dota2ShaderMaskGuide.pdf