Xenoanalyst II as a Shadow? Yes please.

After idling a bit (thanks to school), I am back and today I will take a brief look at the 'Relics of the Gree' event boss Xenoanalyst II.

You can easily kill the boss in story mode while only having one tank. No Thermal Tolerance debuff -> no tank switch needed. Also, the adds that spawn do not hit hard and are easy to be tanked in one spot without any cooldown. In hard mode, two tanks are necessary to deal with the Thermal Tolerance debuff and Terentatek adds.

So who is the best tank to tank Xenoanalyst II? The answer is, of course, a Shadow! Resilience is once again the key ability. If you time it properly after getting the first stack of the Thermal Tolerance debuff, you will effectively resist 6 stacks out of 10 leaving you with only 4 stacks after the channel is finished. First, your healers don't need to 'omg-heal' you throughout the channel. Second, you *only* get 80% damage taken increased debuff which allows you to tank one of the Terentateks quite safely when it comes to the second add phase where four of those big dudes spawn. However, when Xeno drops below 20% and starts spamming his execution ability, it is probably best to vanish to drop aggro for some time. The stacks won't be gone and guess what the boss did after attacking our other tank? He turned to me and I went splat in one hit - 28k. I believe the execution targeting isn't arbitrary and respects the aggro table since it was first one tank, then me, then our highest dps, then another dps. I don't have any real evidence yet, but the execution seems to work as 'hit and wipe aggro' ability.

At the end of the day, this fight is pretty straightforward and requires no exceptional skills or gear. Well optimized Black Hole tier should be more than enough to take on this boss in hard mode. Having a Shadow tank just neutralizes the most lethal mechanic ;-)

Will post more regularly now, until then...