Xotli template

The Hierarchy ruled the Antillian kingdom from the city of Ptahuacan , where they conducted dark rituals of mass sacrifice for their demon-god to bring him forth into the world.

Xotli appeared to his Antillian worshippers as a rolling cloud of ebony darkness; a vortex of ultimate, boreal cold. Xotli would consume the living souls of those placed upon his pyramid-like altars in the islands of Antillia , while the bodies of the dead were discarded into a deep pit to feed the dragons kept inside the pyramid. In his later years, Conan the Cimmerian travelled to the Isles of Antillia and fought against the followers of Xotli, who had been harassing the citizens of Aquilonia by unleashing their Red Shadows to steal countless victims as offerings for the voracious Xotli.

Conan defeated the dark god, before liberating the citizens of Antillia from their cruel rulers, by using a phoenix-shaped amulet given to him by the prophet of Mitra , Epemitreus the Sage. By smashing the amulet, Conan released the power of Mitra's Light, which destroyed the demon-god and saved the lands of Hyboria from the Red Shadows. Its cooldown can be rather long, and even with feating cooldown reduction it is still long. Furthermore, the combo does all of its damage at the end of the combo, which is a rather slow animation, and if it misses, all of your damage misses at the very end of the whole animation, so you will have spent all the time performing this combo for nothing.

But when it does connect, enemies tend to blow up. A nice aspect of this combo is that you can have multiple ranks of this combo slotted, and each cooldown is independent. I use the two highest ranks of Pillar for maximum AoE damage, since I can use one while the other is on cooldown. I Eat Your Heart: It does just what its name says. Against minions, this combo performs a fatality that rips their heart out, killing them instantly, and heals you. Use it to clear minions in raids or heal yourself in bad situations where you need the health.

The long cooldown kinda affects its utility. Useful for getting into fights or chasing down enemies who are fleeing. However, once properly feated, it becomes an insta-cast AoE cone nuke in front of the HoX that can be cast while moving and in between steps in combos.

One of the most powerful spells in the game and an essential part of what makes the HoX fun. It turns you into a tentacle-faced demon for half a minute, giving you increased health and damage while stunning enemies all around you and pulsing fire damage all around you for the duration of the demon form. Use this at the beginning of large fights to give you time to set up on many enemies at once by stunning them, then wrecking them with your AoE spells and combos.

I cannot stress how much fun it is to turn into a demon, stun everything around you, spam laugh a few times to hear that ugly demon laugh, do your cultural dance in demon form, then run away or die because you spent too much time having fun in demon form instead of actually fighting.

Word of Command: This is a quick casting AoE root spell that freezes enemies around you in place, making them easy pickings for your other abilities. Great for keeping enemies from getting away from you, or getting to you.

Once feated, this spell becomes instant-cast, which makes it a very powerful and unpredictable cc. Dread Visage: This is a cone AoE fear that sends your enemies running about in circles. This is mostly for PvP, as in PvE, it is difficult to land combos on feared enemies, and tanks will hate you for this.

Then you should use it all the time. Contract of Protection: This is your four hour mage shield buff. You cast it and it decreases a certain amount of incoming damage. Like vegetables. Burning Skull: This is a buff type spell that damages an enemy that hits you for a little damage.

It has a cool animation, but in its base form, this spell has some serious flaws. So after three hits or ten minutes is up, you have to reactivate this ability. It quickly becomes a nuisance to have to constantly click to reapply Burning Skull, despite its cool animation, and I tend not to bother with it in the heat of battle, reactivating it when I have time and feel like doing it.

Arcane Abatement: This increase your protection against cold damage. Only certain enemies and necromancers do cold damage……I sometimes forget we even have this ability. Demon Maw: This is a useful buff. It increases your fire magic damage, but it also applies a DoT to you that hurts you. However, you can convert the DoT to a health regeneration buff by casting Hellfire Breath.

Since as a HoX, you want to be casting Hellfire Breath all the time anyways, that DoT will never be a problem for you unless you run out of mana. So this buff is basically a free damage and healing increase. Exultation of Xotli: This is a buff that briefly increases your weapon damage bonus, only to give you a longer lasting but weaker debuff to your weapon damage immediately afterwards.

Then you get a massive spike in weapon damage for key combos like Burn to Death or Pillar of Flame, which is followed by a manageable debuff to combos where you can cast spells or use Hell Strikes in the meantime. You basically take very little damage for 6 seconds while getting a movement buff to charge into battle or run away or spin around in circles.

Use this spell whenever you are in a bad spot, and it will take care of you. This is the fun part. A lot of what makes HoX special is the depth of customization you can attain through feat choice.

Go deep into the Avatar tree, and you can become a demonic blade-wielding terror, almost constantly in one demon form or another, spreading damage with powerful combos.

Go deep into the Possession tree, and you can make whole crowds of enemies instantly disappear with powerful spells, while resisting critical crowd control that would down lesser mortals. This feat tree is focused on increasing PvE melee damage output through buffing combos and demon form.

It is the less popular of the two feat trees because it offers fewer survivability and burst damage tools. However, in my opinion, it offers the higher dps of the two feat trees, it just requires heavy investment in order to wring the most out of this feat tree. Fiery Weapons and Improved Fiery Weapons: This gives all your melee hits a chance to proc extra fire damage. Both are good to help you advance down the feat tree. Spreading Flames:! This basically turns your best dps combo into an AoE.

Always get this. Demonic Fortitude: Ability Gives you a spell that refreshes your stamina and energy at the cost of mana. You generally want mana more than stamina to get off Hellfire Breath at every opportunity, so this is pretty much a waste of a feat point. Really only good for Louhi-specific raid specs. Rage of Xotli: Increases the damage of Hell Strikes. A small damage increase, this feat really should be a 5 point combo instead of just 3, but if you use Hell Strikes a lot, this feat increases your dps.

Demonic Strength: Increases weapon damage in demon form by quite a bit for 3 feat points. Worth taking, especially this high up in the feat tree, since you will be in demon form a lot. Flame of Xotli:! Definitely get this. Reaching Flames:! Good for hitting massive waves of mobs in raids and group dungeons, since your job as a HoX is to do as much damage to as many enemies as possible.

This feat is great for two feat points spent. Demonic Supplication: Ability Increases the duration of your demon form once every 15 minutes. The duration increase is very nice, but fifteen minutes is such a long cooldown that half the time I forgot I had this ability even when I had it. Now with Demonic Strength being a much better feat than the Mindless Brute feat it replaced, I would say there are plenty of better options to get over this.

Blood Pit: When you perform I Eat Your Heart or sometimes when killing an enemy, spawns a little red pool on the ground that heals you when you stand near it. Handy for leveling, and gives fairly good value for 1 feat point even at level 80, as it gives you a little bit of that much-needed survivability that Avatar has so little of at this stage in the feat tree.

Fire Lance:! Ability A fairly fast and strong combo that you should always consider fitting into your rotation. Something of a faster, higher damage Hell Strikes with a longer cooldown. Butcher: Increases your overall melee weapon damage. This feat is a great boost in damage to all of your melee combos, and should always be looked at for Avatar heavy specs. Flaming Hatred and Searing Hatred:! Decreases the cooldown on Pillar of Infernal Flame.

At this point in the feat tree, your five points are best spent here. Remember that you can have multiple Pillars in your rotation, so this cooldown affects every pillar that you use. That makes for a much shorter downtime for two combos instead of one, and greatly increased AoE dps. Searing Hatred is a decently strong DoT that is a good investment for one feat point if you have one to spare, adding a DoT to all enemies struck by your huge AoE Pillar.

Wrath of Xotli Significantly increases the power of the fire pulsing from your demon form. On Avatar of Xotli, your upgraded demon form, the damage increase is very noticeable for two feat points spent, dealing huge damage every two seconds. However, there are many other feats vying for attention this deep into the Avatar tree, and two points spent here may mean sacrificing something more important such as instant Inferno Curse for a PVE spec.

Choose wisely. Damning Eloquence and Burning Hex: If you have points to spare, Damning Eloquence is a very nice investment to make your debuff spell insta-cast, which makes it much easier to fit into your rotation.

However, with recent changes to the class, there are so many other places to invest your points that this can be sometimes overlooked just like Wrath of Xotli. The DoT from Burning Hex is rather low and should not be a priority feat.

Improved Burning Skull:! This changes your Burning Skull to passively do damage to a nearby enemy until your Burning Skull is activated.

Less useful when you will be hit a lot, preventing this feat from activating all that much. Hellfire Feast: Gives you physical mana tap when in demon form.

If you find yourself having mana problems, look to this feat to help you. Searing Curses adds damage to one of your slower, lower damage combos, which increases its usefulness, but not by too much. Flame Cleave gives you fire combat rating, which is always nice to have.

However, all of this builds up to Hell on Earth, a spell of questionable usefulness. However, the situations where you can afford to restrict your sphere of movement to a limited area as a melee class are not that many in a raid situation and especially in group raids.

And in the few cases where you can actually stand still for a length of time, the debuffing can be done far more easily by other classes. I personally ignore this whole feat line, but for some fans of the Avatar tree, it might be quite powerful. Demon Within, Desecreation, and Avatar of Xotli:! Ability The whole reason you invested in the Avatar tree to begin with.

All of these are great for any HoX. You abandon the tentacle faced demon for a ponytail, tree stump feet, and a toilet seat wrapped around your neck. This feat tree contains core feats that every herald should have in their arsenal. Any feat build is going have a decent number of feats from this tree.

Fortunately most of the good feats are relatively easy to get. Reduces the casting time on Hellfire Breath while increasing its cooldown. This is the most important feat for the HoX, and is core to its identity.

You must take this feat first no matter what. Fury of Xotli gives you a chance for your Hellfire Breath to be cast for free. While mana is important when you have limited mana to work with and Hellfire Breath is the largest use of mana, this feat is competing with a lot of other useful feats this high up in the Possession feat tree, so pass on Fury of Xotli or at the most put one point in it. Only pick up some points in this if you need the few extra points in a dps-related feat to get down to the next level in the feat tree.

Spitfire: Ability Gives you a fairly short-range insta-cast spell that applies a DoT that can spread and debuffs enemy healing. But you want to spend all those points so you can get the 15 second cooldown reduction on Hellfire Steps from Touch of Hell, which is very important in PvP.

Improved Word of Command:! This increases the range on your AoE root and more importantly, makes it insta-cast. This is a very powerful feat for two points and makes one of your cc abilities extremely quick to use and unpredictable. For PvP this is essential, and for leveling in PvE it is still very good.

Demonic Link: This increases your magic damage in demon form. More damage, especially magic damage, is always useful. Flame Lash and Inferno:! Ability Flame lash is a single-target ranged spell, probably one of our longest ranged spells, with a fairly short cooldown, though not a spammable one. It should be spammed on cooldown if attacking single mobs and bosses. Inferno on the other hand is a giant AoE that ticks damage every few seconds to everyone around you.

Both spells gain increased damage from stacks of Flame Lash, which last for 15 seconds and can stack up to While the Flame Lash spell does good damage even without stacks of Flame Lash, Inferno does pathetic damage at no stacks, but this increases to very good damage at 9 or 10 stacks. One point in Flame Lash is generally enough for PvP as a ranged nuke, but investing in all of these two feats is a good way to go for PvE. Undying Glory of Xotli:! Ability Here we go.

For leveling, the usefulness of this feat cannot be overstated. Sieges are another dreadful chapter. World conflict to own a Battlekeep, huge efforts to build it in terms of material, huge efforts in terms of sacrifice to maintain it against the enemies storming the walls.

Compared with minigames a siege gives nothing in terms of PvP xp and reward; Compared with Shrines of Bori it gives even less; So why should one bother about sieging at all? For fun you could answer. True, you got a point.

Unfortunately there are a lot of issues which are removing the fun factor from the siege activity, some have been mentioned above, other are purely technical. It's not possible, not understandable and not acceptable that after 3 years from the release with a top maching and an ADSL connection a player, a customer is not able to perform properly in a siege, at low settings, with everything disabled.

Playing a 48vs48 content having the whole raid stuck in huge red lag spikes it's impossible, it's not fun, it prevents you from doing anything it DESTROYES any effort you made to build up the keep, it does not allow you to defend what you got and build with sacrifice. If you are lucky the siege will crash.

The only chance of salvation. But we can't blame only the SH mistakes. The Community playes a bigger role in this. The class Y is UP! I stopped posting anything openly flame-baiting on the forums since a month or so, I'm much more focused on finding a way to perform despite any possible issue. This is a plea to you all fellow PvPers, if the game is what it is, the ONLY WAY we have to keep it enjoyable is to focus on the community, to focus on the way we play.

Let's try to be less selfish, let's try to play more for the sake of playing rather then for the dire need of establishing ourselves as the best overall in the whole universe. We would all have benefits from this. See you the next time.

It's about time to write down something on how I would use the Crowd Control now that the new system has been settled. To summarize the changes from the HoX point of view we can start with these small points: 1 Dread Visage is now 1 second casting time; 2 Word of Command is now 0. The 5 points above should be enough to grant a player an overview on how the Crowd Control works now and how it will affect his own way of using them. The first thing that becomes clear is that the HoX lost its instant CC, I wrote in the past that CCs like WoC and DV were used mostly for defensive purposes, something like a "oh shit" ability to escape dangerous situation, that is obviously not the same anymore, even though the first impression on it made me scream about the nerf I have to be honest that it was not so if you try to watch it in the greater picture.

The modifies to our CC are now forcing us to play our class more tactically, we have to time properly our CC and we absolutely need to be able to prevent what our opponent will do, movement and positionin is now even more important than it was before and the line between a good HoX and a not good HoX is now even more defined. If you are able to prevent and react properly you'll survive, else you're dead meat. Simple as that. More in detail: WoC: I'm not using it only to escape anymore.

I can't cast it instantly but it's a great tool to be effectively supporting especially when trying to help the flag carrier, in a minigame played yesterday I managed to get our flag carrier out of troubles a couple of time by simply rooting down the chasers with WoC and interrupting their casts and combos with Hellfire breath.

I'm alse re-evaluating the role of WoC as a backup CC for when I stun a target, I'm perfectly aware that the stun can be easily removed especially in early stages of a fight, but the process takes at least 1 second and I'm managing to apply the root before my enemy is removing the stun gaining in this way enough time to either land a buffed ToX or to retreat waiting for a better moment to shot it.

What comes out from this small analisys is that now the HoX has less "selfish" tools and that's bad but has on the other hand of the deal more "teamplay" tools which is not a bad thing after all, it's true that we are maybe a bit forced to play that way, but in the long run it will turn out to be a good thing creating some kind of "mutual aid" behaviour in minigame, and it's always nice to see a guy standing between you and your death just because you saved his back before.

I'm enjoying my "new" role of supporter, and especially in crowded fight when healers and flag carriers are the main focused targets my root or fear or stun can often change the tide of the fight. It's all about making the habit to this new style, I wouldn't dislike a bit more of survival, but while I wait for it, at least now I can try to find a new "reason" for my class, and a new role I may like to play. I hope you enjoyed the read.

Take care. Labels: [Guides and Suggestions]. Monday, 6 June Fury: New dimension of life. So we've been through the server merge. The new experience within the new PvP server Fury has begun and after a week of play I can try to summarize my impressions on it.