Xul, The Gatekeeper
by JR Cook - 8 years ago show comments
Xul has finally come into the nexus bringing an amazing kit with him to assist your teammates. Xul, despite being a specialist can control a team fight with amazing ability and bring incredible push to your team. We’re going to go into a build that should prove very useful into turning your opponents into corpses and help win team fights like this:
Skills
This skill shot ability will summon a scythe that returns to you a second after you cast this ability dealing a base 312 damage to everything in its path. You can also cast this and pull back to extend the range of it. Its not a bad skill to use when you’re being chased down.
This turns your attacks into AOE attacks that have a HUGE arc in front of you. We’re talking Leoric’s Skeletal Swing range. This skill also reduces the attack speed of enemies who get hit with this by 50% for 2 seconds. Melee assassins hate this guy for this one weird trick! Press W and find out why!
Now, normally a 2 second delay on a root sounds pretty awful. Its not, use this, give it some time and follow it up with a Spectral Scythe for some free damage on top of the 2 second root and the base 83.20 damage it starts off with. This skill is deceptively good despite its short range.
Trait Raise Skeleton
Everytime an enemy creep dies, you get a skeleton. Their HP bars are also their timers, but getting 4 full HP skeletons up to a tower is going to be a lot of tower shots soaked up since they will soak 2 shots from a tower. Kill creeps constantly. These little guys are deceptively good.
Ultimates
Whoo baby, I sure do love me this ult. This ult absoltuely shreds the HP pool of low HP heroes, if this clips a Li-Ming or someone as squishy as her, that’s roughly 60-75% of their HP that just turned into poison. This does a base 592 damage as posion applied over 10 seconds. With the 4% scaling per level, that’s a HUGE amount of damage right there.
This will summon 4 skeletal mages in a line from where you cast it. The mages will do roughly 49 base damage but also slow them by 30% for 2 seconds. The mages also hang around for quite a while lasting 15 seconds. This is also a great ult, I just love poison nova more.
The Build
Level 1 Backlash
The shield bone armor provides is fantastic, but chopping off 15% of a hero’s HP once it expires is absolutely disgusting. Shade is great too, but if you’ve got a tank in your face, this is going to just chop a beefy chunk of their HP off if they stick around too long.
Level 4 Jailors
I thought Death’s Reach would be the go to ult here but I was wrong. It feels counter intuitive for what Xul wants to accomplish. Jailors does more of what you want by providing extra damage on that person you rooted.
Level 7 Harvest Vitality
Now we’re taking, this gives you incredible amounts of sustain in a fight. Now your cursed strikes heal you for base 68 HP per enemy hero hit. This is an godly skill for objective centric maps where you know people are going to clump up.
10 Poison Nova
See ultimates section
This is a temporary version of giant killer that does more work in conjunction with Harvest Vitality. Chopping off 2% of enemy hero HP pools per strike is simply disgusting and shouldn’t be underestimated. Great arguments can be provided for Decrepify, but this is the skill I prefer, it just adds onto your now already formidable sustain.
When you hit an enemy hero with Spectral Scythe its cool down is reduced by 4 seconds, down to 8. This is a great skill that’s going to just combo great with the last talent in this build.
20 Mortal Wound
This is the ultimate healer gut punch. Anyone who gets hit by Spectral Scythe now has their incoming healing reduced by 75% for 4 seconds. This skill just does nasty things to anyone trying to get healed. That ancestral isn’t nearly as scary if it goes on someone with this talent applied to them. Same with Lt. Morales. This skill is just disgusting.
Strategy
Push, push hard. If you are the only Xul on the map, you have pretty much free reign to push any lane you’re in. Curse striking a full creep wave will guarantee you 4 skeletons that will suck up tower shots and just give you additional push over time. If your lane is fully pushed, rotate to another lane and help push that lane to provide additional push. Cursed strikes are amazing for wiping out big creep waves. You can force people back to base easily by catching them out of position during this phase and hitting them with that bone prison, scythe combo, and slapping a few cursed strikes on them to make it harder to hit you back. Popping your bone armor and sticking on them until it expires will chop off that addition 15% of their hp pool as well. When team fights start happening, you want to make their retreat as difficult as possible. If you can bone prison a back line that could body block the rest of their team from retreating, that’s fantastic. But you want to maximize your cursed strikes so getting yourself into a position where you can hit 2-3 people will help your sustain in team fights. Anyone who can enhance your basic attack speed is your best friend. You love Morales. A lot. Cursed Strikes is a count down, not the number of strikes you use, so anyone who provides additional attack speed is a massive boon for your ability to murder heroes. This build is a deceptively strong build, providing a staggering amount of sustain in team fights as well as damage and stuffing enemy healers late game. Try this build out, I think you’ll embrace it fully.
