The eidolon vampire, better mind control frame than Nyx, what Caliban wished he was - Revenant!
Release date: 2018-08-24
Passive: When Revenant’s Shield is fully depleted, he emits a radial pulse over 7.5 meters inflicting 100 Blast damage with maximum 75% Damage Falloff.
Enthrall - Convert a target into a zealous thrall. Thralls turn on their allies and enthrall through damage. On death, they disintegrate into a damaging pillar of energy. The thrall horde remains under Revenant’s spell until this Ability runs out.
Mesmer Skin - Become enveloped in Sentient energy, which redirects damage and stuns all those who dare attack. Stunned enemies can be Enthralled at no energy cost.
Reave - Dash through enemies as a wall of Sentient energy, leeching shields and health from any encountered, enhanced for thralls.
Danse Macabre - Erupt with a multitude of Eidolon energy beams and sweep a circle of death around Revenant. The beams will modify their Damage Type to target select defenses, while incoming damage is redirected back into the beams. Hold fire to boost Status Effects and Damage, at the cost of increased energy consumption. Thralls killed by this leave overshield pickups.
Acquisition: Main blueprint is awarded upon completion of the Mask of the Revenant quest, which is unlocked after reaching Rank 2 - Observer with The Quills. Component blueprints are acquired from Plains of Eidolon Bounties.
The small glow-up this frame got after the introduction of Overguard had huge impact on his power level, there is a reason he was the most used frame in 2023. Giving Mesmer Skin that 1sec of invulnerability made him the ultimate scaling frame. Enemy damage? Doesn’t matter. Enemy health? Doesn’t matter either, Reave through them all! He’s the ultimate lazy mode frame, just bring a good gun/melee and you can do literally any mission in the game with ease. I won’t be surprised to see him nerfed/changed but I won’t be surprised to see him remain untouched either. He’s really strong, but not oppressive to other frames. He does kind of invalidates all enemy damage, which could be a problem but we have enough game modes that require you to keep something other than yourself alive that I don’t think he’s game breakingly OP.
I think dedicated point defense frames like Mag, Frost and Nyx have a better claim at being ultimate ezmode, but Revenant is definitely up there. I don’t find the taunts on Thralls to be reliable enough for missions that involve defending an objective, in such cases I’d definitely prefer a more complete frame like one of the ones listed.
Revenant is an interesting beast. Right now we’re in the middle of an invisible war between Reb’s baby, Revenant, and Pablo’s baby, Nezha. At one point, Revenant was a high water mark for survivability, but other frames are starting to catch up and steal his thunder.
Revenant provides a lot of security and failsafes, to be sure, as well as being part of an older paradigm where you have room to fit Helminths for some fun combos. For instance, dusting my old Revenant off I found a set that mashed up Savage Silence and Blinding Reave. I’m not sure if the old Blinding Reave + Xata finisher combo works, but there’s another potential option. You can give him some pretty good crowd control by rounding out his kit with Resonator, and I personally also really like Thrall Pact + Tharros Strike to turn him into a gun platform so I can play with my collection.
He also has one of the coolest deluxe skins in the game.
While not game breakingly OP in his own right (He scales infinitely but can’t really nuke that hard) I think he does have a negative effect on other frames as he’s part of the reason we get so many bosses that just spam ability nullification.
I don’t think it’s Revenant’s fault specifically, it’s just that it’s pretty much impossible to make a challenging boss without it having the ability to either ignore or disable abilities. Warframe abilities are absurdly broken, they can completely turn off enemy AI, do millions of damage per second, provide you with 99,9% damage reduction, not to mention shield gating being a thing nearly every frame has access to. Our guns are no better, there is a reason DE implemented Attenuation, horrible as it may be. For better or worse, Warframe is a power fantasy game where you are an invincible god slaughtering enemies by the thousands. The only way DE was able to somewhat introduce “difficulty” is by restricting your gear choices, first with Circuit and now with Deep Archimedea, and even then the game modes are still easy provided you get lucky with a frame/weapon choice.
I feel like its definetaly possible but its just not with DEs skillset. some damage attentuation combined with some development on the mechanics we see in the profit taker, exploiter and ropalolyst fights would make for some more interesting boss fights. More enemies like the deimos Saxum (The sack with two legs), Nox and Bursa wouldn’t hurt either.
That is true, but even the example fights you mentioned boil down to “boost gun damage, don’t die” which just favors frames like Rhino/Rev/Chroma. If you add ability nullification to the mix to try to even the odds, shield gating/rolling guard tanks replace them, like with the secret boss The Fragmented One. And if you bypass both, then Warframe choice no longer matters and the game kind of falls apart. I don’t think there is a way DE can give us a boss that allows true frame diversity while also not being a complete pushover or invalidating choice by making all frames mechanically the same by attenuating the damage/disabling abilities.
I agree but at the same time 60 eyes can be face tanked with a single recharge delay mod and rakta dark dagger. Or nuked to death (slowly) by octavia because she can sit outside his range.
I thought a bit about what I would consider the “best” Warframe boss in terms of design and I think it’s Exploiter Orb. It has the most build variety possible without requiring you to bring a necessary frame/weapon and without getting trivialized by one either. It mostly boils down to doing mechanics, but the way it mixes having to shoot the boss/killing adds to prevent them from cooling it allows for both tanks, CC and kill frames to work well. It’s also balanced so it can be done solo but more slowly, or in a group for a faster kill. My only issue with it is that the mechanics are not explained nearly well enough, I would’ve been lost on my first attempt if not for reading up on it’s abilities on the wiki.
