HooblaDan: The question is in the title - I see an 'auto choose' button on my character window, but I cannot figure out for the life of me how to manually choose upgrades for my character. Can anybody tell me? I'm sure it's something silly that I'm missing.
If you're playing a pre defined character, i don't think you can manually choose upgrades, or at least i didn't find a way to do it.
If you wan't to have a character suited to your style, you should probably create a character yourself instead of going with a pre defined one.
Edit: I just checked. You can't manually upgrade your avatar if you're playing a predefined character.