Revenant, better known as “WHY ARE MY THRALLS SO BAD, SCREW THIS I’M GOING TO BE A BALLERINA”

Oh hey, a new Warframe came out and his acquisition isn’t as god awful as Khora’s. Revenant came out in his own little update, Mask of the Revenant, with a shitty ‘quest’ that got you his blueprint, but only AFTER you acquired all his parts via high level bounties, one of which can also get you Gara parts. I admit I got lucky (by playing with someone who regularly seems to sacrifice goats to Lootcifer) so I managed to have Revenant built in a pretty short amount of time.

I’m going to be honest, it’s not worth rushing Revenant. I normally refuse to rush anything, but I know some people like getting things now. Save your plat. Use it to buy the badass armour set Revenant comes with.

That does put Revenant in a negative light, doesn’t it? In fact, Revenant’s getting criticized as hard as Khora was. It took two weeks for Khora to be tweaked and buffed, but at the end of it, Khora became my second favourite frame after Volt, due to how useful she is and how nice it is to have a pet cat alongside my Sentinel. Revenant though, it’s only been a week and he’s already had one buff and one nerf. The nerf being a lot bigger than the buff.

So what does Revenant do? He does Sentient-y things.

His first ability is Enthrall. This allows you to control up to 7 enemies, who will switch sides, follow you around and shoot other enemies. This was the little buff, as it was only 4 enemies on release. Unfortunately, any Thralls you have can very easily be murdered by your team mates, but at least they leave a burning column of Sentient Fire when they die, so their deaths aren’t completely in vain.

His second ability is Mesmer Skin. Basically you get damage resistance and a charge of 10, which reduces every time an enemy hits you. Every enemy that hits you then gets put to sleep, opening them up to finishers and also enabling you to enthrall them for zero energy cost.

Then you have Reave, in which you turn into a wall of fog, literally a small wall, and charge forward, sapping health and energy from anyone you hit.

Finally you have the ballerina part of Revenant. Danse Macabre turns you into a spinning top, shooting lasers out of your hands and murdering everything around you. The energy cost for this, since it drains as you use it, is 20 energy per second, the highest in the game (and increased from 12.5 in his singular nerf).

The complaints I’ve seen have been two-fold. Firstly everyone agrees that Thralls are shit. They die instantly, you can’t have enough of them and they hold up waves of Defense since all enemies need to be killed. Their AI also isn’t very good and they’re generally not very strong at all when it comes to killing enemies. You can enthrall some interesting things (I managed to enthrall Shadow Stalker today) but enthralling enemies basically turns them into magnets for allied Tenno bullets. It’s a mediocre ability and it’s not helped by the fact that Enthrall has a fricking duration on it.

Yeah, Enthrall sucks. Even if you use it to just make flaming pillars.

The other main complaint is that Revenant’s theme is broken, that his abilities don’t match up and he’s not Eidolon-y enough. But honestly I disagree with this. All his abilities are things Sentients do. They take over and control minds (like Hunhow did to Lotus, like Natah did to the Tenno to get them to murder the Orokin), they have weird damage resistances, Vomvalysts turn into walls of mist and hurt people and Danse Macabre is a good variation of Eidolon lasers. These abilities all match a Sentient theme, but they don’t specifically match an Eidolon theme.

But even then, it’s not so much that they don’t match a theme, it’s more that they’re all lackluster abilities. They don’t seem to do much and they’re not very flashy or attractive outside of Danse Macabre.

Still, with a little bit of elbow grease, I’m sure Revenant will come out fine. But I do recommend using as much efficiency as you can on him, since his abilities are all pretty costly…