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Buffs:
- Contract of Protection: The classic mage shield. The first line of defense against incoming damage.
- Arcane Abatement: 1650 protection against cold damage for 6 seconds. You might think that 6 seconds deem it useless, but 6 seconds is what determines life or death in some occasions.
- Molten Steel Slash (MSS): Melee debuff combo with -10 decrease on the target's fire,cold & electrical invulneratibilities.
- Inferno Curse (IC): AoE debuff most HoXes neglect: -15 decrease in the above invulnerabilities (stacks with MSS), & -415 combat rating decrease on the target, or targets around you. You can also feat it and convert it into an insta-cast debuff
- Hell Strikes (HS): with 5-step combo finisher at end level, it deals a heavy amount of clear damage.
- Burn to Death (BTD): Apart from the 3-step combo finisher, it also applies a heavy fire DoT. If feated, it can potentially spread through multiple targets around.
- Pillar of Infernal Flame (PoIF): A combo with heavy burst damage at 360 degrees around you. An AoE combo. At end level, you'll find extremely effective to use both PoIF 2 AND 3.
- Body & Spirit Wrack (B&SW): A not so powerful combo by itself, but it inflicts a reasonable amount of mana damage. If feated, not only this mana damage increases, but it returns a hefty amount of it, back to the Herald
- Desecrating Essence (DE)/Avatar of Xotli (AoX), commonly called as Demonform: Not a mere lightshow, with an ugly face as finale: It's a melee & magic buff, and while the monster within is out, it inflicts fire damage which can be feated too. It's on a 120secs cooldown timer (which can be reduced to 60 if feated from Avatar tree).
- Demon Maw (DMaw): an end-level +200 magic damage increase and an insane natural health regen effect. Cast Hellfire Breath every 10 seconds, and it won't turn to bite you. It's also on a 120 secs timer.
- Exultation of Xotli (EoX): By it self, it offers a brief 20% base melee damage increase for 10 seconds and a -20% decrease for 10 secs after it fades. When feated, the damage increase bonus rises up to 90%.
- Word of Command (WoC): AoE Instant-cast root
- Dread Visage: Casts Fear at 90 degrees angle in front of you for 5 secs. Handy if you're about to go down
- Phoenix Cloak or what I usually call "The HoX's 26 seconds of tanking glory": 50% damage deflection, coming at a high cost... -65% decrease in cold invulnerability and a heavy movement penalty. In short, don't even think to use that spell against a Necro without Arcane Abatement on (see buffs) & without making sure you're within melee range. The movement penalty can be reduced a lot, by investing 3 points on Phoenix Wings (Posession)
- Hellstep: HoX's charge ability, which ticks fire damage for 8 secs. Fully feated, that time will increase by 5 (8+5=13secs in total) and it's cooldown will be reduced by 15 secs. It's not uncommon to kill a mob just by charging on it.
- Burning Skull: an instant cast spell, which will hit your attacker. So, even when you're knockbacked, the skull will be there to punish every 3 seconds, whoever did it. It comes in 3 charges and they can be replenished in virtually no time, by simply, recasting. Be careful if you decide to feat it though: It will hit any hostile, or potentially hostile around you -city guards included.
By now, it must've become apparent that the HoX is a debuff/burst damage Class. The trick, really, is to time his abilities accordingly, in order to spread the damage as evenly as possible, during a boss fight. A reasonable start is:
- HFB - DE - HFB - MSS & IC (if feated for instacast) - HFB - EoX and either BTD, or PoIF 2 & 3 (depending on what you want to do - place a heavy DoT, or burst the hell out of the target)
- Continue alternating between combos and HFB, until DE cooldown is on 60 seconds. Now it's the time for DMaw to up your magic DPS, while Flame Tongue will have given you it's maximum combat rating increase by now.
- Shortly after DMaw expires, DE should have become available.
As you see, the whole thing revolves around the cooldown timers of DE and DMaw, really:
- -Avatar HoXes will have their DE available every 60 secs, DMaw every 120 secs and AoX every 5mins.
-Possession Hoxes will have DE every 120secs and Dmaw every 120 secs. To counter this, they've got Tongue of Xotli every 2.5 mins, a permanent 100 magic damage bonus from Knowledge of the Underworld, 10% increase in HFB from Hatred of the Living & Chains of Anguish every 45 secs.
Personal Note: There has been a long talk about how weak Avatar is, against Possession. In my opinion, this was never the case. It's the extra goodies Possession offers, that you can't just have them all in one build...
Tafale mentioned in his own guide (apart from other useful things) something I've been missing -and I don't think I was the only one out there:
Combo and Spell Merging
You should always try to fill the Burn to Death combo with spells. In practice it means for example doing Hellfire Breath, Burn to Death combo till the last key, Tongue of Xotli followed by another Hellfire Breath before hitting the last key. All this is done in one combo
It has been there all along... Hell Strikes & Burn to Death, our basic 3 step combos, are awfully slow, in both steps and finisher animation. Regardless of build preference, merging these combos with spells (HFB, ToX etc) before hitting the combo finisher, is something every HoX benefits from, dps-wise.
