Perhaps one way to modify Doom is that Xeno herself needs to stay in play. I abuse it myself ... She’d be less successful if she has to survive 30 seconds in boss node.
1) Agree with this idea.
Removing doom when Xeno tags out will be a very minor nerf to Xeno and help stay true to her supposed glass cannon role (--withdrew my comment about Xeno being a get-out-of-jail-free-card--). Right now, she isn't a glass cannon because she can tag out immediately after inflicting doom and hide behind tanks. Doing fatal damage to all 3 tough defenders on a rift node from the safety of a benched position isn't that fair.
Furthermore, this makes it possible to swap out to a tanky Red Velvet to reliably inflict hex to counter the Xeno counters of Last Hope, Big Top, Bio-exorcist, Kill Joy etc. In the current meta, a Xeno, Red Velvet (also has chaos banish to remove lightweight, immune, laststand or other catalyst xeno counters), Surgeon General (to counter hexy time) team can kinda beat even counter-Xeno defenses easily without losing hp points. With the proposed changes of Xeno-tagging-out-cancels-doom, Xeno can still counter these counters by inflicting hex with bandwagon rushdown, but she'd have to gain meter and do it herself (and not simply tag-out and leave it to a tanky Red Velvet).
2) As others have noted, Xeno could become more balanced by limiting doom uses to once or twice.
In general, Xeno should help break tough nodes, but should not be spammed for all 3 defenders on that node. One possibly easy way to effect this is to slightly increase the duration of doom from 30s to 40s. The effect of the slight duration makes it cost more rift score for each use of doom (10s delay = 20 points per use), and
makes dangerous to try to doom for all 3 defenders as you could run out of time. Xeno players will have increased incentive to use her high damage stat and actively attack in tackling at least one of the defenders.
3) Gamma has noted that one unfair point is that Xeno-based attackers do not have to lose any hp points in tackling the hardest boss nodes while all other strategies need a lot more player skill to be active in attacking and completing the node while avoiding any mistakes / receiving any damage.
An alternative to increasing duration of doom, is to have perhaps each application of doom will cost 25% hp from every team-mate. This will be similar to Bio-exorcist's SA and stay in line with the "dark power" theme, but inflict a rift points cost in terms of hp for usage of doom.
