Unchosen Champion

There wasn’t anything particularly special about Coop’s heavy ethereal spears. When compared to the other weapons in Coop’s arsenal, the primary difference was how unbalanced they were. In fact, they were essentially identical to his regular spears in every way except for one; they were really, really heavy. The only change he made to his regular summon was to push the imaginary slider that determined the manifestation’s weight all the way to one side. The resulting density defied conventional wisdom. They would be useless if not for his absurd stat stacking giving him the Strength to lift them at all.

When Coop first accepted his Revenant class, the only two active skills he had taken were Retribution and Salvation. Passing over active damaging abilities had been a calculated risk, but given the isolation of Ghost Reef, he felt it necessary. The pair of abilities provided proper equipment when he had none available and enabled a basic attack focused build, one that wouldn’t be limited by downtime or be reliant on others in any way. The old fort didn’t exactly have a burgeoning network of artisans or mercenaries waiting in the wings to party up or craft for him on their remote island.

At the time, he was primarily concerned with making a coherent build while keeping in mind the limited options he had on Ghost Reef. He needed to be self-sufficient right off the bat, and there was no time to wait for a build to come together with additional skills while depending on teammates to fill gaps. Retribution and Salvation were the key ingredients to establishing the foundation that would keep both him and Jones alive as they divided the civilization shard’s responsibilities between themselves.

Retribution summoned weapons of solidified ethereal mists. Back then, Jones had helped him explore the skill’s limitations, and the two had concluded that Coop was bound to weapons from eras long past. They weren’t exactly correct, lacking critical information on the impact that mana was having on their world, but they were pretty close. The end result of the limitations on skills were the same. Coop’s arsenal was restricted to certain weapon types from specific eras. Luckily for him, humans had already developed plenty of innovative ways of killing each other at every level of technology, so he had an abundance of potential tools to test out. Too many, really.

From the start, the two active skills had exceeded expectations. Taking them both had immediately awarded Coop with the Ethereal title which seemed designed to prevent him from being disarmed while using a full set of ethereal equipment. Coop was happy with the ostensibly small bonus. He thought it could be even more functional with some creative application, though his imagination barely scratched its true potential. At the time, the additional feature provided by the Ethereal title led him to the idea of using thrown weapons. The disarm protection would be a convenient way to return deliberately discarded weapons back to his hand.

Jones assisted him in making adjustments when he first started experimenting with the skills, and Coop quickly learned that he could fine-tune the summons, adjusting the weight, balance, texture, and even appearance of the solidified mists. The flexibility astounded him. It was an early taste of what was actual real magic, flipping his understanding of what was possible upside down.

Coop and Jones worked together to get his initial weapons up to par, and one of the first changes Coop made to his spear was giving it more heft. It was his plan to use the weapon like a javelin when he needed a ranged alternative. If the weapon was too light, it didn’t have the mass to even fly through the air effectively, and given that the weapons were made from mists, they could be extraordinarily lightweight.

Adding weight and changing the balance of his spear had turned it into the weapon that defined his early tactics, providing the blueprint that kept him alive through fight after fight. Back when he was spending weeks hunting Ancient Defenders on the beach, he spent his time optimizing a single grind, experimenting with ways to become more efficient.

Later, he discovered that the Ethereal title wasn’t restricted to a one-way link where only his weapon would be returned to his armor. The Primal Kites pushed him to discover that the title could also drag himself through the mists to reconnect his armor with the weapon instead of vice versa, and Coop established another invaluable aspect of his build: mistjumping.

At first, he had resigned himself to aspirations of becoming an undying skirmisher, trading mobility for survivability, and trading lethality for relentlessness, but mistjumping turned his expectations upside down and woke the greed to have his build do everything. As far as he was concerned, being so agile completely broke the balance of the Revenant class. He wasn’t just the unyielding and defiant combatant that the class initially advertised. He was agile, tricky, and fast enough to transform what should have been limited options into entirely new avenues of destruction. If the Revenant was meant to be a proper tank with enough stats to stand toe to toe with raid bosses while allies rained damage on their foes, it was the titles that elevated it into something beyond expectations, with the Ethereal title, granted by Retribution and Salvation, opening the floodgates.