Spirit Ashes were an interesting new feature in Elden Ring. And now, in Nightreign, we get a Nightfarer specializing in spirit summoning – Revenant. On top of summoning her specific spirits, she can also raise fallen foes from the dead to fight for your team. And, she can also raise her fallen comrades and briefly make them invulnerable to damage.
These impressive skills are counterbalanced by Revenant’s peculiar attribute scaling, incredibly low health and stamina, and the fact that she can’t easily regenerate FP, which prevents her from becoming a dedicated incantation caster.
Because of that, before you can play as Revenant, you need to unlock her by beating a pretty tough encounter to prove that you understand the game. We have a guide for unlocking Revenant that will help you with that process. And if you’ve unlocked her and would like to know how to actually play her, then this guide is what you need.
Skill Playstyle
In group fights, focus on easily-killed minions to raise them as ghosts
Summon spirits to help you win tough encounters
Use your ultimate to revive fallen allies and prevent them from dying, also to make sure your spirits survive long enough against bosses to deal good damage
Passive Ability: Necromancy
Effect: Raises enemies as ghosts to fight for you. Approach: In group fights, defeat weaker minions first to have them fight for you
Despite her frail appearance, Revenant is a character who likes to get her hands dirty. Whenever you finish off a regular enemy, you raise them as a ghost that fights for your team. These ghosts don’t last very long, but they don’t time out too fast either. They tend to deal very good damage, but they absolutely refuse to wander far from the spot where they were summoned.
The important thing is that Revenant needs to be the one to actually deliver the killing blow for the ghost to spawn. Thankfully, Revenant’s starting weapon deals good damage, especially when you two-hand it, and has a nice attack range.
When your team is fighting a group of enemies, make sure to get in there and finish off some of the weaker foes quickly to add some cannon fodder to your side. Your ghosts can create other ghosts, but there seems to be some limit and hidden cooldown on how many ghosts you can create and how often.
If you time it right, you can finish off the stronger enemies preceding the Night Boss fight last. This will summon them as ghosts and help you pummel the boss into submission in no time.
You raise a rat……that raises another rat
Character Skill: Summon Spirit
Effect: Summon one of three spirits to aid you in battle. Approach: Don’t feel like you need to save your spirits for the perfect moment. Summon them all the time.
Revenant’s active skill gives you a lot of flexibility in how you approach encounters. We have a separate guide that will teach you how to properly summon Revenant’s spirits. But basically, you first need to pull out Revenant’s summoning lyre by pressing Y+LT or your control scheme equivalent. Then, make sure you’re not holding those buttons to actually summon one of your spirits. There’s no time limit or cooldown on spirits. You only need to wait a bit to summon them again should they fall.
Summon Helen the Page – RB/R1
Summon Frederick the skeletal Pumpkin Head – RT/R2
Summon Sebastian the Giant Skeleton – LB/L1
Unsummon ally – LT/L2
In the heat of battle, it’s easy to accidentally pull out your lyre and discover that none of your regular attacks work. And while playing a rousing tune may be good for morale, it won’t help you defeat the Nightlord. If you accidentally pull out the lyre when you don’t want to use it, simply press the dodge button and your controls will return to normal.
You can see your spirits’ health bars at all times, even when they’re not summoned
Helen the Page
A fast and agile fighter, Helen pokes at your enemies with a rapier. She deals good damage to single targets and she moves fast, which oftentimes saves her from receiving too much damage. Use Helen against strong single enemies.
Frederick the Skeletal Pumpkin Head
Frederick is the bruiser among spirits. He’s big, slow and lumbering. He attacks with wide sweeping strikes that have a good chance to hit multiple enemies. Use Frederick against groups of enemies.
Sebastian the Giant Skeleton
Sebastian isn’t too mobile and mostly just sits there swiping his giant fist at anyone who gets close. He is a fantastic tank and has an AoE scream attack that deals minimal damage but is likely to make your foes attack him instead of you or your allies. Use Sebastian when you need a distraction.
Ultimate Art: Immortal March
Effect: Revives fallen allies regardless of how many times they’ve fallen, makes your team immortal for 10 seconds, buffs your spirits. Approach: Save it to raise your allies when things go wrong and you can’t revive them with regular attacks.
Ultimate Panic Button
As you and your allies fall in battle, it becomes harder and harder to revive them. In a scenario where you’re the only one left and both your allies are down with three bars of purple between them and victory, it can be incredibly hard to find the time to manually pick them up.
This is when you want to use Immortal March to revive your allies and make them immortal for the next 10 seconds. Immortal March doesn’t make you invulnerable – you will still take damage during it, you just won’t die.
And if you want to make your Immortal March even better, there are relics that allow you to fully heal your allies when you use Immortal March by paying some of your health. This shouldn’t be a big problem because thanks to the immortality you get when this skill is active, you’ll have plenty of time to heal up.
Whenever Immortal March is active, you can see a buff icon indicating that it’s working. But it can be hard to spot during a tense moment. Instead, you can look at your character’s model. Immortal March adds a ghostly glow to it for its duration.
Power Up Your Friends
It takes a long time to recharge Immortal March, so you should ideally be saving it for tough clutch moments. Still, if you have any of your spirits active when you use it, they’ll become immortal too, and they’ll get stronger on top of that. Your spirits will also gain new moves while Immortal March is active. The most notable of those is Sebastian’s big beam attack that looks cool and can do some serious damage.
Weapon Strategy
Despite her poor HP, Revenant is not a pure caster. You need a melee or ranged weapon on her
Weapons with status effect build-up are the best for Revenant
Always be on the lookout for good seals with powerful incantations
Not a Caster
Revenant’s attribute scaling makes her fantastic at casting incantations. But she doesn’t have a way to restore her FP during battle outside of using consumable Starlight Shards. This means you can’t play her as a pure support caster. Moreover, unless you’re playing in a team of friends, forget about using healing incantations. With their long casting times, no direct communication with your allies, plus ping-related issues, you’ll never get any use out of them. You instead want seals that can provide you with a burst of reliable ranged damage.
Your best option there is the Godslayer’s Seal that lets you cast Black Flame. This spell deals nice upfront damage and then keeps damaging the target over time based on its maximum health. This makes it particularly strong against tough bosses.
When hunting for seals, your best bet are the Great Church locations. Unlike Churches of Marika where you upgrade your flasks, Great Churches have enemies, bosses, and loot. There you get a nice chance to get a seal as a drop. Great Churches also often have tunnels underneath them. You’ll find bosses in these tunnels, as well as altars that are guaranteed to have some seals inside.
Great Church tunnelSeal altar
Porcelain Cannon
Outside of her summons and Faith scaling, Revenant’s attributes are all mediocre-to-bad. However, her Arcane attribute scaling is second only to Executor. This makes Revenant very good at applying status effects. Since her direct damage won’t be great no matter what she wields, and you need to wield something, the primary thing you should be looking for on your weapons are status ailments. This means:
Frostbite – deals damage based on target’s max HP and makes it more vulnerable
Blood Loss – deals damage based on target’s max HP
Scarlet Rot – deals continuous damage
Poison – deals continuous damage
Weapons with Frostbite should be your main priority. Blood Loss is also very good and significantly more common on weapons. And if you can’t find either of those, Scarlet Rot and Poison will also be useful during extended battles. With Revenant’s attributes, it doesn’t really matter what weapon you use to apply these effects. It can be a dagger, a greatsword, a bow, or even a sorcery catalyst. Keep in mind that some weapon do scale with Faith and Arcane, making them more effective for Revenant, like Cipher Pata or even her starting claws. Still, going for status ailments with Revenant will always be your best bet.
Before you find a good status weapon, you’ll still need to fight to activate your passive. Luckily, Revenant’s starting weapon is actually really strong, especially when you two-hand it. The attack animation of her spectral claws takes some getting used to, but they actually have fantastic range – way higher than what you would expect out of a claw-type weapon.
You can hit the target dummy with the starting Revenant claws from this distance
Gameplay: You Dictate the Pace
Revenant’s main strength lies in how front-loaded she is. You get access to all your summons right away. This lets you tackle stronger locations immediately after starting an expedition. As you’re flying into the map, find a juicy spot, mark it and go there. With your summons, you’ll be able to quickly defeat most mid-tier encounters and go up to level 3-4, find some powerful weapons and hopefully a good Dormant Power by the time Revenant-less teams will gain their second level and maybe a flask upgrade.
This early boost quickly compounds, as you can then keep fighting stronger foes to become stronger yourself much faster than you normally would.
In battles, after you summon your spirits, your main targets are weaker foes you can quickly dispatch to turn them into ghosts and add them to your army. Because of that, you should favor encounters with adds, not big singular monsters.
Throughout it all, you need to be mindful of where your enemies are. As Revenant, you will want to use melee attacks often, but you’re very fragile and can easily go down if you’re not careful. If things start to go wrong, you can use your ultimate to escape certain death, and then use the immortality window to apply your status ailments to the boss before retreating to heal up.
This should cover the basics of how to play Revenant. Now go out there and summon some ghosts and spirits. And if you have any additional questions, don’t hesitate to ask them in the comments.
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Val Hull
Resident role-playing RPG game expert. Knows where trolls and paladins come from. You must fight for your right to gather your party before venturing forth.
