Arknights: In-depth Review - Gavial the Invincible

Gavial the Invincible is the future Limited 6★ Centurion Guard featured in the Great Axe and Pen Nib banner, which will run alongside the Ideal City event. Gavial the Invincible is possibly one of the most heavily anticipated Alternate Operators in the game, owing mostly to Gavial’s notable (but unused in her Medic form) strength. How well does her backstory translate into her in-game power? Let’s find out!

As a 6★ Centurion Guard with strong bulk and powerful laneholding capabilities, it’s almost impossible to avoid a direct comparison between Gavial the Invincible and Blaze. While lacking any sort of infinite duration Skill to effortlessly hold lanes without putting any strain on the player, Gavial the Invincible’s kit is full of powerful offensive Skills with amazing uptimes that can easily fit between waves of enemies. 

Gavial the Invincible also differentiates herself from Blaze by, following the trend of other recent laneholders, containing powerful gimmicks in her skillset to enable some more active and strategic play and push her viability even further. By properly utilizing her Skills, Gavial the Invincible can easily hold multiple lanes at once for a while, or even grant herself incredibly strong Shelter-like effects for huge increases in survivability.

As a result of all this, Gavial the Invincible provides significantly higher results than Blaze and other Centurion Guards for a more active playstyle, while still featuring simple and easy to understand Skills that work without any setup and even shine in events like Integrated Strategies, where she’s one of the preferred starter picks for high difficulty runs.

Compared to other popular laneholders and Centurion Guards, Gavial the Invincible is quite a bit ahead of the rest in every single stat when factoring in her first Talent’s effect, losing only to Mudrock in terms of sheer bulk.

Even without factoring in the conditional aspects of the aforementioned Talent, Gavial the Invincible sits comfortably atop most other laneholders in terms of raw stats, already giving her a head start when it comes to her viability in the role.

Gavial the Invincible’s Attack and Defense are increased by 10% (+2% at P3). Additionally, increases Attack and Defense by a further 4% (+1% at P3) for every enemy blocked.

Very simple Talent, but really effective at inflating Gavial the Invincible’s stats to absurd base levels when the conditions are met. As part of her kit she features ways of getting enemies to be blocked by her even if they may not be on her path originally, and even ways of increasing her own Block number at will for especially big waves. Without factoring in Potentials or outside sources of Block increase, Gavial the Invincible can go up to 1060 base Attack and 695 base Defense.

Gavial the Invincible receives 20% (+5% at P5) additional healing. Additionally, this effect is increased to 40% (+5% at P5) when her HP is below half.

While this could be a strong effect on many other laneholders, it’s sadly pretty wasted on Gavial the Invincible. She's already sufficiently tanky not to need constant, large amounts of healing, and the one Skill that gives her some self-healing capabilities is the one that doesn’t give Gavial the Invincible either strong versatility or huge burst damage. 

While we’re talking about this, it is important to highlight that, unlike other popular laneholders such as Mountain, Thorns or Mudrock, Gavial the Invincible doesn’t have any good self-sustaining capabilities, outside of her near-useless first Skill. As a result and since she likes to be blocking enemies often, Gavial the Invincible needs some sort of healing support often, which may drag down her appeal quite a bit as far as pure laneholding goes.

When activated, Gavial the Invincible’s Attack will increase by 80%, and heal herself for 40% of the damage she deals. This Skill costs 25 SP and has a 50% total uptime of 25 seconds.

Paired with her second Talent, this Skill can give Gavial the Invincible some good survivability as long as she constantly has targets to hit, but generally this is not the Skill you want to be using. Not only does it lock you out of her two, significantly better Skills, but the resulting Operator will essentially be performing the duties of a worse Mountain while on a timer. It’s not recommended to use this Skill in any scenario, unless you have no other laneholder at all and can’t afford to bring healing support or change your strategy.

When activated, Gavial the Invincible’s Range will expand significantly to a two by three rectangle right in front of her, her Attack will increase by 180%, her Defense by 50%, and she will pull all unblocked enemies towards herself with Medium force when she attacks. This Skill has an SP cost of 35 with a 40 second duration, giving it an uptime of 53%.

This is generally considered to be the Skill that turns Gavial the Invincible into a very strong laneholder, and the one she uses more often in all kinds of content. While lacking the comfort of an infinite duration that Blaze can provide, this Skill brings forth significantly better Average DPS paired with a strong support effect in her pulling that combines well with both her first Talent and the increased bulk of this Skill.

Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, is how this Skill turns Gavial the Invincible into one of the best partners for the most powerful Operator in our near future, Młynar. While she has nowhere near the insane Burst DPS as our future knight of Kazimierz, Gavial the Invincible’s Skill cycling lines up almost perfectly with Młynar’s downtime, covering for the time where he’s not attacking with still more-than-respectable DPS and holding the lane until he’s ready to fire again.

Finally, this also turns Gavial the Invincible into an extremely popular pick for Integrated Strategies 3: Mizuki and Caerula Arbor, as this iteration of the event removes the instant Elite 2 choices when starting a run. As this Skill is available at Elite 1 and still plenty strong without masteries, Gavial the Invincible is considered one of the best openers for high-difficulty runs of the gamemode.

Overall this is an extremely well rounded Skill with an incredibly high uptime that mixes well with many strategies, in many events, and with top-tier Operators. Definitely a Skill worth looking into, even if it lacks the raw damage of her third Skill.

When activated, Gavial the Invincible’s Attack increases by 140%, her Attack Speed doubles (0.6 seconds per attack), and her Block count is increased by 2. For the duration of this Skill, Gavial the Invincible takes 50% less damage from all sources, including True damage, When the Skill ends, Gavial the Invincible will slowly receive this mitigated damage over the course of 20 seconds. This Skill has an SP cost of 35 and a duration of 25 seconds.

All these buffs translate into a massive spike of Burst DPS designed to rival even the strongest Operators with similar, wave-clearing DPS spikes on short and manageable cycles, such as Mountain. Part of what makes this Skill great at this kind of burst is also how its Block count increase pairs incredibly well with Gavial the Invincible’s first Talent, giving up to +30% Attack and Defense under ideal conditions.

As with all Skill with strong but conditional boosts, though, it is important to note that Gavial the Invincible will need the stars to align in order for this aforementioned boost to take its full effect. Not only does she need five strong, bulky enemies to come her way to maximize her DPS, she also needs constant healing support in order not to die from this assault, making these conditions really unlikely. Still, with such huge bursts of damage it’s not necessary at all to completely optimize the damage this Skill can provide.

In a vacuum, this may very well be Gavial the Invincible’s better Skill thanks to its massive DPS, but it certainly lacks in versatility when compared to her second one. Definitely still one worth using if you need some Operator to fill this role, but generally players will prefer her second Skill as a sub-DPS option to combo with other Operators and take advantage of its support tools for different events.

So, should I pull for Gavial the Invincible? Is she really that much more powerful than Blaze? Strong enough to be among the top laneholders? The answer is PROBABLY. Gavial the Invincible has a very capable skillset with a really good mix of strong DPS and support abilities, but it is undeniable that she lacks in some aspects to truly be considered as strong as the non-Blaze laneholders. Regardless, this strength does not go to waste and she’s still way more than capable if given the right support and circumstances (by which I mean a single Medic). Finally, Gavial the Invincible comes packaged in an incredibly strong banner where, strong as she is, she’s still the weakest of the three, so saving pulls for her is the right option either way.