Arknights: Proviso - An In-depth Review

Proviso is the 5* Gacha Operator coming with the event An Obscure Wanderer. She is the eighth Decel Binder Supporter the Global server will receive, and her kit is quite dense with goodies.

Players familiar with Podenco will see a familiar silhouette in Proviso’s kit, and she slots nicely in between Glaucus and Istina without stepping too hard on either of them. In terms of usability, Proviso is, at a glance, likely the most comfortable Decel Binder below the 6* rarity. On top of this, she brings with her an incredibly potent base skill, making her an attractive pick up for anyone interested in boosting their base’s production numbers.

Is Proviso worth raising? Off the back of her combat kit alone, probably not, but it’s really not that simple this time. Her combat kit is easy enough to understand, on top of being a fairly effective one - her main problem is just how dominant the 6*s are for accomplishing the tasks you might pick a Decel Binder for. What complicates things is how impactful her base skill is. Anyone that’s interested in both this and her combat kit, should definitely raise Proviso, but if you’re only interested in one or the other, then there’s a lot to consider.

Decel Binders are ranged units with a range similar to Multi- Target Medics, and their attacks deal Arts damage and inflict a short duration slow on enemies. The slow that they inflict is a named effect (i.e. it won’t stack with other effects of the same type), but the game simply calls it Slow, which can be a source of confusion. Colloquially, many players refer to this effect as Sluggish, and that’s the name this article will use too.

Decel Binders’ attacks inflict 0.8s of Sluggish, which decreases enemy movement speed by 80%. They have a base attack interval of 1.9s, which returns an uptime of roughly 42%. 

This is a simple Talent: Proviso gains +10 ASPD (+12 at P5), she also gives this buff to a random Kazimierz ally when deployed. +12 ASPD shifts her attack interval down to about 1.696s, and pushes the uptime on her auto-attack Sluggish to ~47%. It’s not much, but it’s not nothing, either.
The effects of this on any given Kazimierz Operator are outside the scope of this article, but suffice it to say that for the likes of someone like Młynar, it is a healthy - but unnecessary - boost in their damage output. Kazimierz teams might enjoy this Talent for some tight clears, but for most of us it is simply a happy boon.

Proviso gets the Module type that works best for her; neither of her skills interact well with the increased Sluggish duration of the DEC-Y variant, because they either already increase Sluggish duration (Skill 1), or set her attack interval to max out the uptime anyway (Skill 2). She would also still lose to Istina for auto-attack Sluggish uptime, reaching just 70% vs Istina’s ~81%.

The base Module effect provides a +0.2 SP/s boost when there’s an enemy in Proviso’s range, the upgrades add a small ATK% buff to her Talent, and the flat stats offered for the module are HP and ATK. Ultimately, none of this is very transformative for Proviso, and it is difficult to recommend picking up the Module, or its upgrades.

This is a Power-Strike adjacent skill, meaning it has a short charge time, activates automatically, and slots neatly into the rhythm of Proviso’s auto-attacks. If you’ve heard this line before, you might guess where this is going.

At M3, this Skill costs 5 SP (auto recovery), and it can hold 3 charges. When activated, this will deal 300% of ATK as Arts damage to the target, it will also increase the length of the Sluggish effect to 1.6s. 

At max investment, this Skill’s rhythm will be once every third or fourth attack, assuming Proviso is always attacking, and always has an enemy in range.

The increased Sluggish duration is not affected by Skill Levels, it’s always 1.6s; and this increased duration interacts neatly with her Talent, a 1.696s attack interval returns an uptime of roughly 94%.

That’s about as much as there is to say for this Skill, though. It’s cute, but very much not worth the investment when considering how poor the mastery gains are: SL7 -> M3 offers a meagre +30% ATK scale, and an SP cost reduction of 1.

This Skill is reminiscent of Podenco’s S2; at M3, when activated, Proviso deals 350% of ATK as Arts damage to all enemies in range, and inflicts Sluggish and Silence on them for the Skill’s duration.

Mastery is much more important for this Skill, the duration increase from 7s to 10s alone is a significant bump; it also increases the initial burst of damage from 280% to 350%, but a Decel Binder’ damage is probably not what you’re signing up for in the first place.

The increase in duration gives a cycle of 10s on/25s off, returning a total cycle of 35s and an uptime of ~28%. This uptime doesn’t sound very inspiring, but it pays to remember that this isn’t the Skill cycle of a DPS Operator. It’s perhaps a better perspective to measure Proviso by how often she’s ready to provide her utility, and every 35s is a pretty comfortable place to be. It’s fast enough that players won’t need to feel pressured to save it for the perfect moment.

This Skill also massively decreases her attack interval (-1.1 at M3), pushing it all the way down to 0.8s. Conveniently, this aligns her base attack interval with the duration of her Sluggish effect.  This is more for the sake of insurance, though, as all enemies in range when the Skill starts will be slowed for its duration anyway, relegating this interval shift to slowing down enemies that enter range after activation.

For many players, this is the real meat and potatoes of any discussion regarding Proviso, and to be frank, you are better off getting this info from the horse’s mouth. 

Base experts have already done a lot of analysis regarding Proviso’s base skill, and you can find her entry in their Base Combo Guide here. PeterYR also provides a brief analysis of her base skills in video format here.

In any case, here are some basic takeaways for Proviso’s base interactions:

• Proviso manipulates ‘Default Orders’, which are defined as Gold Orders that cost 2 or 3 units of Pure Gold.
• At E2, Proviso increases the amount of Pure Gold traded in Default Orders by 2 (2 -> 4, 3 -> 5).
• She does not work with Tequila’s base skill, as he looks at the initial value of the Gold Order.
• She also does not want to work with Operators that increase the number of Gold Bars traded, such as Bibeak, Kafka, Shamare, etc.
• Players with a 252 base setup can consider downgrading a Trading Post and transfer that power to upgrade a Factory, partly because this base setup can actually benefit from this exchange, and partly because:

Proviso can add significant strain to your Gold Bar production, so players should exercise caution when considering where to spend Drones lest they run out of Gold Bars too fast.

Let’s see how well Proviso stacks up against her 4 and 5★ brethren. For this section, we won’t be considering the 6★ entries, as Suzuran typically fulfils a fundamentally different role, and Angelina is just a better Istina.

We’ll start with the easy one. Glaucus struggles to see play; 6 seconds of Bind and a small pop of damage simply isn’t enough to warrant the investment. Glaucus has a similar cycle (~30s), but she’s faster, mostly thanks to her Skill being an ‘instant activation’ effect that allows her to start charging SP for the next round.

Proviso is arguably easier to introduce into strategies owing to the fact that Bind is less obvious about when it is strong. Many players will find it easier to identify moments where Silence is good given how the cue is simply: “Is there an annoying effect I can Silence?”

Proviso, to many, will look just like a Podenco glow up, and this is a fairly accurate assessment as Podenco S2 is functionally the same Skill as Proviso S2. The major differences being that Podenco offers a faster cycle with less damage and a more focused area of effect.

How often these differences matter is a nebulous question, and an exercise that is perhaps better left to the reader.

Before talking about Istina, here’s a small table that might help to visualise the differences in cycling between Proviso and the above two Decel Binders:

Glaucus and Podenco, both have a short duration of SP Lockout when activating their skills, preventing them from instantly starting to charge SP. This is approximated in the above table.

As mentioned earlier, the big takeaway from this kind of analysis is how often each of these Operators are able to provide their bursts of utility, rather than simply looking at just the uptime %. It’s also a nice way to visualise the impact of their Modules, as even working on the assumption that an enemy is always present, the cycle reduction is fairly insignificant.

Istina is the first Decel Binder that has a significant difference to Proviso in terms of their combat kits. Istina presents a more classic kit, akin to Operators like Orchid or Angelina, where the focus is on inflicting Sluggish through simply attacking the enemy.

Both of her Skills accomplish this in different ways, S1 focuses on a single target, and S2 focuses on up to three targets. Both Skills have much longer durations than Proviso’s, and for this reason alone Istina will outperform Proviso if the goal is to slow down one target (or a few) for a longer period of time.

With that said, it’s hard to ignore the elephant in the room. Istina’s cycle times are long, it’s something that makes her awkward to use, and it’s a glaring weakness when stood against her 6★ cousin, Angelina. Because of this, it’s hard to speak favourably about Istina when comparing her to Proviso.

Proviso presents a comfortable Decel Binder kit for combat that is very reminiscent of Podenco. Much of her power will be online with just her E1 promotion and SL7, and ordinarily it is difficult to justify promoting a 5* to E2 - however Proviso’s upgraded base skill makes a strong argument for considering her second promotion.

Ultimately, the players most interested in Proviso are likely to be base enthusiasts, at least to some degree. For anyone interested because of her base skill, Proviso is worth promoting. Even those that care more about her combat performance will end up with a happy boon.

It is a rare celebration that a 5* comes to us with such a potent base skill, but it’s important to remember that this isn’t a mandatory expense. The return on investment for Operators promoted purely for base is typically quite long, with many requiring a multitude of years to pay back the initial investment. 

Even Operators like Tequila - who has a similarly powerful base skill - takes roughly 1.6 years to pay back the investment if you already have the rest of his Trading Post team assembled. Proviso’s return on investment is slated to be much shorter, somewhere in the order of 200 days - which sounds great, but it’s still over half a year.

So “Is she worth raising?” … tentatively, yes.