Revenant - a Ritualist or Dervish?

[draxynnic.3719]

@"Nikolai.3648" said:

I have to disagree with that statement. The Revenants source of Power are the Mists, more specific the Legends they channel, basically echoes of powerful beings. What do we know about Ritualists? They do bind real spirits (as evident multiple times in GW1) and not mere echoes. The only way to work around this would be to claim that there is no real necromancy in Tyria at all, and every spirit is just a well-made copy from the mists. While possible, that seems unlikely. The thing closest to channelling a legend is their use of ashes, but that resembles the use of powerful artefacts made from the dead, not at all the channelling of a legend. Dervishes on the other hand do channel something. We know that it is not divine in nature, which leaves us with the easiest explanation: Dervishes channel Legends - the Legends of the human pantheon. While you can argue that it was never explicitly stated, this is the easiest explanation for a lot of questions regarding the Avatar-Skills, as seen in my post above.

"Closest to" is an important statement there. I'm not saying that the two are drawing from exactly the same sources.

It is explicit, however, that both are essentially drawing power from things in the Mists. In the case of Ritualist spirits - I see your point, but the urns aren't the only things that might be echoes. Ritualist spirits, for instance, seemed to be embodiments of emotions and similar concepts - the ritualists at the time clearly believed that they were summoning actual spirits of the dead, but we've had numerous cases where the beliefs of GW1 professions proved to be wrong. For instance, human monks believed their power came directly from the gods - there was evidence at the time that that wasn't actually the case, and it's well known now that it wasn't.

Such evidence arguably exists in GW1 for the ritualist, too. While there are entities in the god realms that resemble ritualist spirits (the Wailing Lord, for instance), ritualist spirits don't resemble most of the inhabitants of the Mists. They don't look much like ghosts or most other inhabitants of the Underworld or even the Mists in general. Arguably, the GW2 necromancer's Shadow Fiend is more strongly linked to calling a spirit from the Underworld since it actually does appear to be an Underworld shade.

This is all maybes, however. I personally think that the ritualist was calling on actual spirits, and the appearance was mostly for visual recognition reasons. However, it is something where we may be mistaken.

With regard to the larger issue of whether the dervishes were essentially calling on a "legend" of the human gods:

There is a comparison, but I think there is the significant distinction that entities that employ god avatars seem to be fairly universally either humans or other beings linked to the gods. Other entities that were mechanically Dervishes existed, but they didn't use avatars, and were generally presented as being more of a kind of melee Elementalist (water djinn, for instance, were typically dervishes, but none of them had avatars). Conversely, it seems that anyone can draw from revenant legends, regardless of having any connection to them or not (apart from a bit of research and training).

With this being the case, I'm inclined to think that the dervish is primarily drawing from elementalist magic, with avatars and some other skills essentially being early forms of what are now human racial skills. Certainly, there was no indication that dervishes were reaching into the Mists for power - most references to what dervishes did that weren't specifically linked to the gods involved attuning to the land in a similar manner to rangers and elementalists. The professions that explicitly draw from the Mists are ritualist and revenant, and this commonality links them - dervishes, as far as we know, do not, and seem to instead be drawing from a mix of elemental magic and the sparks of divinity that the gods imparted into humanity.

Which is born when you look past the avatar forms and look at the other skills dervishes use. All revenant skills are linked to either the abilities of the legend they're channeling, the Mists, or both (even weapon skills are technically linked to a legend, even if not so closely as the utility skills). Similarly, all ritualist skills are linked to the spirits they're invoking, the Mists, or both. For dervishes, though, none of the skills are linked to the Mists, and very few are linked to the gods - most of their skills are elemental in effect, and however much avatars were linked to dervishes, it was entirely possible to make competitive dervish builds without them. Revenant might have a similar 'feel' of being a frontline fighter who augments their physical strength with magic, but the style of those skills are very different thematically to dervish skills, and from a theme perspective, are generally closer to ritualists.

Ultimately, I don't think dervishes and revenants are related in the way you say because the majority of skills dervishes have seem to point to them being linked to elementalists rather than the Mists - there is a bit of the divine in there as well, but it's in the minority, and in GW2, that part seems to have been pulled out of being related to a profession and moved into racial skills.

[DonArkanio.6419]

Oh wow. That's such an interesting discusion here. I really like all the arguments you guys have and I think they are all really valid.I was always a fan of Revenant being the Ritualist descendant, but now i lean more towards the Dervish idea. It just feels like it to me.

I think that's true - Revenant is actually a mix of both. We can't say that Revenant plays like Ritualist nor can we can that Revenant has a Dervish lore connection. For me, it is actually 50/50 of both. Revenants have a lot more freedom since they can become an assassin, support, etc. Combat-wise i think they are a lot closer to Dervishes since they actually go directly into battle (maybe except Renegade) and fight foes using mainly melee weapons.The Ritualist part of the Revenant feels like the similarities in the exact connection to the Mists (we could argue here about Dervishes, since they become avatars of gods which are part of the Mists). They use powers of dead Legends but only if these let them to, I really like the unique theme of Revenants walking this path of dark / light in order to achieve the best combat results.

So, we can't really decide on the most accurate choice here. Revenant, even though a mix of both, is actually a very original concept and pretty much expands on both _magic-infused warrior drawing its powers from the Mists sometimes using god-like Legends. ~ Let's not forget, Mallyx was the second after Abaddon and Glint was the second after Kralkatorrik.

Anyway, thanks for the discussion! It's great to think of these concepts.