Playstyle Overview
Xavian's playstyle revolves around Shining Halo and Swift Repreival management, with the goal of extending Shining Halo as long as possible for the powerful buffs it provides. To achieve this we follow a couple of simple rules.
Do not waste Swift Repreival stacks: Almost all of your rotational abilities provide some level of Swift Reprieval. This only stacks up to 3, and is necessary for extending the duration of Shining Halo. It’s important to pay attention to this so that you’re not losing casts, and therefore extensions.
Smooth Damage Intake: Ensure you’re standing in Shining Halo as much as physically possible. You gain a significant amount of damage reduction and avoidance for being inside this circle, it’s fundamental for your success.
Swift Reprieval
Swift Reprieval is Xavian’s builder spender mechanic. You have 3 stacks that you’re able to build up to, represented by little diamonds on your resource bar, as well as a buff on your buff bar.
Each of your rotational abilities have different chances to grant you a singular stack of Swift Reprieval.
Swift Reprieval is a fairly simple concept, with stacks turning your Brilliant Flare into Brilliant Flash. Brilliant Flash is an instant cast version of Brilliant Flare that can be used to damage enemies or heal allies. It’s your main damaging ability and making sure you’re effectively spending these stacks and avoiding overcapping will make a huge difference on your output in a dungeon.
Rotation
Xavian has a fairly simple rotation that revolves around generating and spending Swift Reprieval stacks. Assuming you’re using the recommended Talent set-up, Xavian gains access to some cooldown reset effects for his rotational abilities, that allow you to use more of those generators, more often. Due to this, Xavian functions more on a priority system.
This priority is as follows:
- Aura Of Solace - Pre-use before pull if high Mana, deactivate if running out/between pulls
- Shining Halo - Maintain this as much as possible, don’t refresh unless it expires
- Solar Blades - Off GCD so can be cast in combination with other abilities
- Blinding Slash
- Omnistrike
- Brilliant Flash
- Sun Strike
Early on you won’t have access to as much Mana regeneration compared to the mid to late game. With this in mind one thing you can do to aid this, is Sun Strike at least once before every Omnistrike. That way you’re always getting Mana refunds whenever you Omnistrike.
Another problem early on is that in single target your Mana economy will be stretched quite thin. As a result I wouldn’t recommend activating Aura Of Solace. You can toggle it on to aid your team with dangerous boss mechanics, but toggle it off afterwards or you’ll find yourself running out of mana fairly quickly. You essentially have to choose between being able to use Solar Shield liberally, or using Aura Of Solace on single target, and I’d always recommend having access to Solar Shield. The damage the Aura does on 1 target is very minimal anyway.
Cooldowns
Xavian has some of the best group utility in the game. With a substantial amount of off-healing and shielding at his hands, as well as a damage redirection aura, your group will be the safest they’ve ever been!
Omega Reprieval - You instantly gain 2 stacks of a stronger version of Swift Reprieval. Using this empowered version on an ally heals all your allies, and using this on an enemy deals Brilliant Flash damage to all enemies. You want to use this on cooldown as it helps you to deal more damage and extend Shining Halo more. There are scenarios where you may want to hold this to help heal your party, but a good rule of thumb is to just use it on cooldown for damage.
Aura Of Solace - This is a toggleable aura that increases our parry by 8%, does a solid amount of damage, and most importantly, redirects 10% of all damage taken from allies to be redirected to you. This is a very powerful tool to aid your group in moments where you are more than tanky enough, and they are expected to take large damage. It does have a good amount of mana drain though.
Solar Shield - An instant cast shield that lasts for up to 8 seconds. While it’s active the absorb provides the wearer 20% damage reduction. This is one of the main reasons Xavian is so strong. On trash he has access to a very low cooldown 20% damage reduction, and on bosses you can effectively make any targeted boss mechanic be significantly less lethal to your group members. It’s very powerful and should be used very liberally.
Ruptured Dawn - This is Xavian’s only form of CC. It’s a fairly low cooldown (60 seconds) frontal cone stun and grip. It’s very useful to stop dangerous enemy casts and group stubborn mobs.
Ultimate Ability
Decree Of The Sun is Xavian’s Ultimate. It provides an Immunity to all damage for 3 seconds that explodes for damage on expiration, and then a further 50% damage reduction for 5 seconds while pulsing AoE healing to yourself and your group. You also get 30% haste and 600% mana recovery for 20 seconds. It’s an extremely powerful ultimate on a roughly 2 minute cooldown baseline, use it as often as possible and only delay uses for specific instances of very high damage intake.
Tips
One of the most basic, but important things you can do in Fellowship is mark specific targets or locations. In the input settings you will notice you have the ability to keybind “Mark Unit” and “Mark location”. These can be exceptionally useful for designating targets to kill or important stack points on bosses.
Interrupts
In Fellowship, interrupts are incredibly important, and as a result being able to see other party members interrupt cooldowns as well as let them see yours is key to success in a lot of dungeons. In input settings you can keybind “Select Interrupt Target”, which will attach a little Hero Icon on the nameplate of whatever target you choose. In combination with this you can then use the "Trigger Interrupt Target” key-bind to always interrupt that enemy when pressed. This allows you to be hitting different targets and able to swiftly interrupt without having to find the nameplate of your Interrupt target again. When used, it’ll show your interrupt is on cooldown to everyone in the dungeon and display a timer for when it’ll be ready again. It’s extremely handy and I 100% recommend setting this up.
Buffs & Debuffs
Buffs and Debuffs in Fellowship are extremely important, but unfortunately the base UI doesn’t place the display of these in a great location. As a result, I’d recommend moving them closer to the middle of your screen using the “EDIT HUD” feature in the game menu.