Stat Priority
The Stat priority on Xavian is as follows:
- Strength
- Haste
- Crit
- Expertise
- Spirit
For the most part, item level is king in Fellowship as a tank, as your mainstat and armour has the greatest effect on your damage and survivability. However, in Season 3 there is much more nuance because of the new upgrade system "Tempering". Regardless, here's what stats do for Xavian.
Haste reduces the length of all our cooldowns, our GCD, and has beneficial feedback with certain talents. It allows you to press more buttons more often, generating more Brilliant Flashes, for more damage, healing and damage reduction. It's easily the best stat on Xavian.
Critical Strike can be very valuable on Xavian depending on your build. Ideally you want around 20% of this stat after you achieve desirable Haste and Expertise. Critical Strikes also have the additional effect of doubling the effectiveness of your shields. This buffs both your healing and damage, and feeds into Invictus if talented, so it’s an all around solid stat for Xavian.
Expertise increases your damage, healing and absorption effects. Most notably, Solar Shield. Having stronger Solar Shield increases our effectiveness by a large amount.
Spirit provides you refunds on mana spending abilities. You want as little of this as possible since you get all the Spirit you need from 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. Emerald Judgement is also very strong, doing a large amount of damage and providing an additional form of AoE CC that procs very often, whilst also ensuring you get uptime of the First Strike buff even on single target.
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.
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 Kindling is our best single target DPS option, with Hunter's Focus being our best overall option.
Iron Spikes is one of the best, if not the best Defensive trait for all Tanks now. It provides a large amount of armour to protect us from the most prominent source of damage in the game: Melee attacks, and does a large amount of damage on its own.
King Of The Hill and Treasure Hunter's Delight are also very powerful, with King Of The Hill having more overall value but lacking the agency over when you'll have the DR in comparison to Treasure Hunter's Delight. You do however lose the ability to really use any utility relic whilst using Treasure Hunter's, it's incredibly greedy, so take that in mind when choosing.
Blessings
The Subduer makes our Major abilities (Shining Halo) reduce the CD of our mob control abilities (Ruptured Dawn). It's also got a small damaging effect. Overall, very solid.
The Intrepid makes the majority of our rotational abilities buff our Brilliant Flash damage further. This applies to omega repreival Brilliant Flash's too, making this Blessing ideal for Xavian.
The Celestial and The Trickster are also powerful revolving around Brilliant Flash that are potentially worth using.
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:
Emerald > Sapphire > Amethyst > 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 Emerald, 6 Sapphire, 6 Amethyst
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.