#reaverposting

BEAUTIFUL QUESTION THANK U. i myself have been given to exploring the concept of a reaver rogue...

the reasons reavers are most suited to a warrior’s skillset are threefold: 1. they sacrifice their health to utilise many of their abilities, and thus should have a large pool to draw from; 2. they have abilities that derive from terrorising enemies and projecting an aura of pain upon those surrounding them, for which it’s helpful to be in the middle of the fight, and 3. the rage-fuelled frenzy into which they sink in combat, and supposedly eventually lose themselves into long term, doesn’t naturally give itself to subtlety

but considering they are fuelled by fear and they are designed to do as much damage as possible fast, i think a reaver rogue could work conceptually. they would need higher constitution than your average rogue, but that is possible, and the legionnaire subclass in awakening shows that high con rogues are trained by some groups. a reaver capable of cooling their rage into an icily precise blade and glorying in the terror they cause seems reasonable to me. you can just imagine them getting stronger and stronger as they stalk through the dark. reavers revel in death! :D i would combine it with some of the assassin spec, as zevran mentions that organisations like the crows use similar blood rituals to increase their abilities, and dao dialogue treats the assassin spec as on par with blood mages and reavers in that regard

as an aside, reavers would also make good spies and assassins on the grounds that they develop an immunity to pain by damage because it only strengthens them, so they should be extremely resistant to getting any information beaten out of them should the worst come to pass, to the point that tallis once completely dismissed the possibility of it being useful to attempt

losing my mind okay so i went to check the dai animations to see if they add anything to this and apparently dai reaver just gives you, like, a giant set of fucking magical claws to sweep through people. okay. sure. i’ll add that to my worldview. why not

anyway. yeah it’s never very clear so a lot of it is up for hc, as far as i can tell. i historically have leaned into the whole biting people most literal interpretation because i think cannibalism is entertaining but nobody’s beholden to that. the animation involves a sort of wrenching hand and a blood effect. technically it’s only ever said that reavers feed on the “essence” or “life force” of their enemies. you could read it as them tearing out a piece of their enemies physically or somehow being able to grab hold of and wrench out life force like it’s a physical substance; i’m guessing they took and ran with that with the dai design, the idea of being able to cut through something more ah essential than flesh. reavers are supposed to be able to feed off pain and death in general

i’m afraid reaver really is the non-mage variant of a blood mage, so i struggle to imagine what use a reaver mage would have of it. i don’t think mages need to drink dragon’s blood to access that kind of power. and there are entropy spells that very much do most of what a reaver does: drain life, death magic, horror...