Design Notes—Revenant

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Revenant class. Mists Invocations. Legendary Stances. Design Notes. In the Land of Eikons.

Here are a few design notes for the Revenant class.

Introduction

The Revenant class presented here is, of course, based upon the selfsame profession in Guild Wars 2. It is, in turn, a successor to the Ritualist profession from Guild Wars Factions.

The profession, relatively new to Tyria (at least in this form), draws magic from the Mists by channeling Legends—dead beings (…mostly) who are remembered by living mortals for their deeds, whether they be beloved heroes or reviled villains.

Attempting to fit this to into the D&D ruleset is challenging, but I have made an attempt.

Legends

As touched upon in the Legendary Somewhere Else? sidebar, the legends described here hail from Tyria. Modifying these to fit in another campaign setting is not difficult, however. The Tyrian legends follow a general ruleset that can be summarised as follows:

These rules are not hard rules per se, so feel free to bend or break them if the need arises. To fit the Legendary Demon Stance to Faerûn, to give a simple example, can be done simply by swapping out the Realm of Torment for Pandemonium (or another suitable Lower Plane), and “Mallyx” for another former demon lord of your choice. Or a still living one—the Mists-born echoes of a true Legend will start to form even before their death.

It should be noted, however, that main point of legends is to point out the deeds of legendary mortals. The Demon stance in GW2 is a bit of an exception to this principle, which probably arose due to the need for a condition-focused legend, leading to the choice of Mallyx as a reference to the original Guild Wars. As such, Mallyx is not a very good example of a “good legend” (and neither is Glint, the Legendary Dragon, really)—though that is a matter of personal opinion.

Mechanics

The class design here attempts to mimic the Guild Wars 2 profession to the extent that is possible while remaining in the confines of the D&D rules and gameplay. As such, the Revenant uses Energy to cast Invocations, mimicking their need to spend Energy on their skills in GW2. While Energy is constantly draining and replenishing in GW2, that is not really possible to implement in a tabletop game. Instead, it recovers on a short rest.

This design fundamentally uses the Monk class as a base—Energy is based on Ki, Invocations based on the way Four Elements powers function, and Mistsfire is based upon Martial Arts. Instead of features showcasing the nimbleness, martial arts, and bodily control of monks, Revenant gain features to suit their nature as Mists-attuned martialists. In practice, this causes them to take a form akin to a spell point-based warlock-like half-caster, although one based on Wisdom rather than Charisma.

Mistfire damage

Most revenant features that deal magical damage do so in the form of a choice between cold or fire damage. This reflects the Revenant’s wide access to the burning and chill conditions, as well as gives it a unique identity in the game. Cold and fire are some of the most common resistances and immunities in the game, but being able to choose limits this from having significant impact (except at high CR, where resistance/immunity to both is more common). At the same time, cold and fire lack the flexibility of e.g. force damage.

It should be noted that such features have you make the choice once for the entire ability when you activate it, rather than for each individual creature affected, or whatever.

Action Economy

The Revenant will mainly use its action to take the Attack action or to cast an invocation. When Attacking, their bonus action is all but certain to be spent on Mistsfire, assuming they hit their target. Should they miss, they might instead use it on a bonus action invocation, but only a handful of those exist. (Aggressive Agility and Phase Traversal are the only ones without a Stance requirement, at time of writing.)

To improve the value proposition of casting an invocation at, e.g. 10th level, (at which point they are 2nd level spells), the Invoker’s Rage feature allows the Revenant to make a weapon attack with their bonus action, after using an action (rather than invocation, to allow features like Tenacious Ruin to benefit) that costs Energy. This notably does not trigger off of Essence Sap. Both because this costs a bonus action and due to not being part of the Attack action, this cannot be combined with the Mistsfire feature.

Invocations

Though the class description does not elaborate on this, invocations have four tiers: basic, advanced, high, and epic, learned at 2nd, 5th, 11th, and 17th level. These correspond to 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th/5th level spells, respectively. This system is heavily based on Four Elements disciplines. However, since high and epic invocations are generally more powerful than elemental disciplines, they are subject to some restrictions.

Several High and almost all Epic invocations have limitations on often they can be used, and because you learn only a limited number of them, you cannot easily work around this. For example, you cannot learn more than one Epic invocation, and since they have short/long rest requirements for reuse, you can generally only use one epic invocation per short/long rest.

Generally speaking, invocations are essentially spells. Many literally just cast a corresponding spell, like Searing Fissure or Renewing Wave, sometimes with an added effect. Others are essentially just modified copies of existing spells, like Patient Spirit (a delayed version of healing word inspired by the spell of the same name), or Call to Anguish and Spear of Archemorus (slightly modified versions of maelstrom and holy sword). Finally, a few are entirely original effects designed to be of approximately the same power as a spell of that level.

Design rules for invocations