Winning Races: Revenants

Unfortunately this Winning Races article isnt just for revenants, but revenant assassins, which isnt too strange seeing as both are DDI exclusive content and I can understand Wizards wanting to pimp both as much as possible. While it does provide about a half-page of fluff content for revenants, a few paragraphs are devoted to talking about how iconic the race-class combination is in terms of mechanics and story. Really though its a page of feats and ki foci.

Every feat requires that you be a revenant assassin with the exception of Raven Queen's Disciple, which also demands that you have bleak disciple (increases temp hp gained by 1, 2 if its bloodied). Most of them mess with shadow form or dark reaping, though a few do some interesting things with one when you trigger the other. 

For example, Quick and Dead increases your shadow step distance after you've used dark reaping for the entire encounter, while Death Walk lets you use shadow step as a free action after using dark reaping.

Some of them require specific class features, even if the feat doesnt modify them at all (helps restrict them for multiclassing purposes). Specter of Death requires shade form, and makes you insubstantial when you are unconscious.

Some are just really fucking awesome. Swallowed by Shadow makes you invisible after using dark reaping, while Raven's Queen Sanction allows you to deal full shroud damage to undead and shadow creatures if you miss with an attack (instead of deducting a shroud first).

The ki focuses are a bit more flexible, though all but one utilize features of the assassin class. There are five, but I'm only going to sum up three of them.

• Cup of death adds to the temp hps gained from bleak disciple and has an encounter power that lets you shift after you hit an unbloodied enemy.
• Death shroud deals standard crit damage, plus extras based on the number of shrouds a target has. It also has an encounter power that lets you auto-shroud a target that you hit.
• Ghost mask deals d8s on a crit and lets you make an attack target Will and deal psychic damage once per encounter. 

Its a lot of interesting and useful options to customize revenants and assassins, with basically nothing in there for anything else. Its not bad, but I'd have rather seen something that supports revenants in general as opposed to on a specific combo. Still, it adds quite a bit, so if you were on the fence about a revenant assassin before this will almost certainly push you over.