Housing Blueprints
Stat Priority
The Stat priority on Xavian is as follows:
- Strength
- Crit
- Haste (22% Min)
- Expertise
- Spirit
For the most part, item level reigns supreme for tanks in Fellowship, as your primary attribute and armor have the greatest impact on your damage and survivability. However, Season 3 introduces more nuance to this rule thanks to the new "Tempering" upgrade system. Regardless of item level, here is how stats specifically affect Xavian:
Haste: This is Xavian's core Stat. It reduces your global cooldown (GCD) as well as the cooldowns of all your abilities, while also providing beneficial synergy with certain talents. By letting you press buttons more frequently, Haste allows you to generate more Brilliant Flashes, resulting in higher damage, more healing, and increased damage reduction. We want to aim for at minimum 22% minimum, you can always go above that, however baseline you do not want to ever be under that 22% mark!
Critical Strike: Depending on your build, Critical Strike can be highly valuable. Ideally, you should aim for around 20% Crit after hitting your desired Haste and Expertise thresholds. Because Critical Strikes double the effectiveness of your shields, this stat boosts both your healing and damage while feeding into the Invictus talent if you have it selected, making it an all-around solid choice.
Expertise: This stat directly amplifies your damage, healing, and absorption effects. Most notably, it strengthens your Solar Shield - and having a stronger Solar Shield massively increases your overall effectiveness.
Spirit: This stat provides mana refunds when using your abilities. You want to avoid this stat as much as possible, as you already get all the Spirit you need directly from your talents.
Item Modifiers
In Early Access Season 3 our gear can now roll up to +3 additional Modifiers. You're limited to 35 Modifiers per Hero from gear and 5 from your Weapon Trait Tree.
Below is the set-up I recommend for Xavian.
Weapon Traits (Major, Heroic & Defensive)
Martial Initiative is the best Major Trait available regardless of what weapon you end up using. The large amounts of synergy it has with multiple aspects of our kit and builds make this a very powerful trait to have.
Visions Of Grandeur is also very strong, when used in combination you are able to get out multiple instances of chains of ice from Darkfrost Drakecarver; slowing the entire pack and CC'ing an entire mob. Alternatively if you are using the Fateful Dawnrender weapon, you will be able to keep the Martial Initiative buff up for around 20-30 seconds, then you are able to roll that with Ultimate combination.
Being able to pick up Visions Of Grandeur without sacrificing Martial Initiative in Early Access Season 3 makes it an extremely appealing trait to pick up at least 1 rank of, the same can be said now for Brave Machinations for more uptime on your weapons.
Inspired Allegiance is easily the best Heroic Trait available. The additional Cooldown Reduction, alongside the stat procs for yourself and your team can be incredibly impactful. After that Seized Opportunity is our best single target DPS option, with Hunter's Focus being our best alternative for pushing ST on bosses.
Generally both King Of The Hill and First Man Standing are solid Defensive Traits. They provide a large amount of reductions to us as we tend to stay around the 80% hp threshold with our Solar Shield and natural self heals with Brilliant Flash. Combined with chain pulling into new packs constantly, First Man Standing will keep you with a new refresh on a flat DR to help manage that.
Alternatively if you want to follow in my footsteps then you can run Treasure Hunter's Delight. This tends to work mostly because I will be using Short CD trinkets, which could be amplified even more by running more white gems, however that's up to all you Xavians out there!
Blessings
The Trickster (4/4): Using your [POWER] abilities grants a massive 10% increased Critical Strike chance for 4 seconds. Since Critical Strike is an incredibly strong stat that doubles the effectiveness of Xavian's shields, keeping this buff active provides huge value for both your survivability and damage.
The Usurper (4/4): Gives your [CORE] abilities a proc chance equal to your Critical Strike percentage to trigger The Usurper's Verdict. This unleashes either 584% Main Stat damage to up to 4 nearby enemies, or 500% Main Stat healing to up to 4 allies (with a 20% chance to trigger both at once). This scales perfectly with the high Crit build Xavian already wants to run.
The Wayfarer (4/4): Periodically grants a colossal +25% Haste buff for 14 seconds. Because Haste is easily Xavian's best attribute, this window turns you into a button-pressing machine. Better yet, casting your [CORE] abilities actively reduces the 60-second internal cooldown, keeping your uptime on this massive stat boost incredibly high.
The Herald (4/4): Allows you to start every dungeon with 50 Spirit Points pre-loaded toward your Decree Of The Sun ability. This gives you immediate access to a high-impact button right out of the gate, making it great for aggressive, fast-paced dungeon pulls.
Necklace Traits
With Season 3 comes the introduction of Necklace Trait Trees. The traits attached are all purely defensive, and require your neck to be of Epic (purple) rarity to unlock. Once you've acquired the appropriate rarity necklace, you're then met with a 2 row tree with 4 nodes to choose from.
I've gone ahead and listed the best Neck Traits for Xavian below.
The Oak is the single biggest flat DR amount available to us as tanks for physical damage reduction. It's extremely powerful, a must have.
The next best trait is The Stag. This trait causes Solar Shield to grant you 30% movement speed and 12% damage reduction for 8 seconds. The uptime on this is effectively 100% making it quite strong, but it's also the only trait that isn't based around Shining Halo.
The Mountain, The River, and The Dune are all okay options, but aren't anywhere near as good as the S-tier traits listed.
Getting a strong Necklace is one of the biggest defensive gains there are for us as tanks and are a complete game changer once acquired. Make sure you're rerolling your traits if necessary and upgrading low rarity necks with materials if you're lacking a Necklace early on!
Gems & Gem Builds
In Early Access Season 3 you can now only equip four gems total, with one slot on your Cloak and Wrist and two slots available for your Rings. The 35% gem power increases on sockets no longer exist but you can still get large amounts of gem power through Modifiers and even a new set bonus (Seal Of The Heskyr).
You can also still combine 3 of the same gem type and size using Gem Fusion (Master Craftsman Braggi NPC) to create a gem of the next size up.
Gem Types & Bonuses
The Gem types each follow a pattern of the type of bonus they provide, a simplification of the Gems is shown in the table below.
| Gem Type | Gem Bonus |
| Ruby | Main Stat / Boss Combat Buffs |
| Amethyst | Critical Strike |
| Topaz | Haste |
| Emerald | Expertise |
| Sapphire | Stats during Ultimate Ability |
| Diamond | All Secondary Stats |
Xavian Gem Priority
When working with Tier 1 gems, I would prioritize the following:
Amethyst > Sapphire > Emerald > Diamond > Ruby> Topaz
Haste is extremely strong for Xavian as it naturally allows you more casts of everything, but Topaz is exceptionally undertuned due to the amount of stats it actually provides.
You'll want to prioritize aiming for this set-up where possible:
- 10 Amethyst, 6 Sapphire, 6 Emerald
This end-game gem set-up is shown below (mouse over the icons for information about each ability):
Seal of the Heskyr (+25% Bonus)
Fortunately, due to the new modifier systems and the introduction of the Seal Of The Heskyr set bonus, Gem Power is actually slightly higher than previously in BiS set-ups despite having less sockets to work with.
You can use Method's Gem Calculator to play around with different configurations and create your own.