Should You Summon: Gala Emile

Welcome to another edition of Should You Summon, a secondary opinion piece to help you decide whether you should consider pulling for the latest adventurers or dragons in Dragalia Lost. This time around, there is simply one sole adventurer featured on this banner, which not only makes your choice in deciding a bit easier to determine, but my job to analyse a lot quicker. Even with that consideration though, you can never count out on Gala adventurers bringing abilities and prowess that allow them to skyrocket into their respective element. Let’s see if this character can do that.

After being mocked by his brothers and sisters throughout the game’s story, as well as being the butt of all jokes when it comes to events, Emile has finally grown into his role as the Emperor of the Dryenell Empire to help rebuild the once prosperous kingdom of Alberia. Gala Emile enters the game as only the third water Gala adventurer, after the releases of Gala Elisanne and Gala Mascula, who have remained meta relative for most of the game’s lifecycle. Gala Emile has the advantage of also entering a weapon type within the water element that, for the most part, has had little to no impact in influencing the water endgame content, except for Lily’s freezing capabilities. Will Gala Emile finally provide an option for wand players to have an impact in this content? Let us find out.

To say that Gala Emile’s kit is nothing but unusual is an understatement. Gala Emile may have some of the strangest capabilities that we have seen from any adventurer in the game so far. This uniqueness primarily stems from his first passive ability, The Great and Powerful Emperor Emile. This passive ability not only increases the damage dealt by shared skills by a whopping 150%, but shared skills that deal damage will also inflict frostbite for a massive 42 seconds, exactly double the amount of time of normal frostbite affliction. His prowess from outputting shared skills is further compounded from his second unique passive ability, Waterwyrm’s Guidance. This passive ability grants Emile an additional four more skill points for equipping shared skills, to a total of 14 skill points, and increase the skill gauge fill rate of his shared skills by 40%.

Besides the benefits he received to his shared skills, Waterwyrm’s Guidance also grants Emile a dragondrive gauge that can hold a maximum of 1,250 unique transformation points (UTP). When Gala Emile has access to utilise his dragondrive, he can activate it and consume 500 UTP, allowing him to summon Mercury and perform a special attack. This attack deals a ridiculous 10,000% damage to enemies in a line in front of Emile, though at the cost of him faceplanting onto the ground and having to recover from his immediate embarrassment. Either way, the player is granted immunity frames all throughout the attack, so use it well to nuke all enemies in your path. After utilising this special attack, Gala Emile’s dragon drive will immediately end.

The last perk of Waterwyrm’s Guidance provides Emile with an ego gauge with three charges. Like previous adventurers such as Sandalphon, Gala Audric and Gala Alex, this ego gauge can be filled by connecting standard attacks, dash attacks and force strikes, and having a charge of gauge at any time allows Gala Emile to use either his first or second skills. Speaking of skills, his first skill Follow Me, Minions!, at an SP cost of 4,980, will consume one charge of the ego gauge to grant the entire team a strength amp (maximum level of 2) if any teammate is located behind him, or a single strength amp if it cannot be met (team map maximum level of 2). His second skill Protect Me, Peons!, also at an SP cost of 4,980, is near identical to use in comparison with his first skill. The key difference is that this skill provides defence amps to the user or a team defence amp to the entire team if any teammate is in front of him. Finally of note, Gala Emile comes with the unique chain co-ability team strength amp = skill haste, which provides an increase to skill gauge fill rate of 6% whilst the user has a team strength amp.

Overall, Gala Emile provides impressive damage opportunities, in combination with impressive support utility with the amps that he outputs. With another teammate that can either enable a team strength amp 3, or a team defence amp 3, Gala Emile can maintain respectable uptime on these support options in fights with the curse of nihility environment, making him one of the most superior buff adventurers within this endgame content to date. Unlike previous amp focus characters who typically trade their great amp output for average damage capabilities, Gala Emile has some serious firepower to back, thanks to the numerous benefits that he receives for his shared skills. Of course, his prowess is very much determined based on which shared skills you have access to. While I won’t go about providing a detailed explanation as to the most optimised shared skills, Gala Emile’s 14 skill point allocations provides him with significant flexibility for endgame fights.

Need Gala Emile to apply a significant number of afflictions to remove the Fiery Resistance debuff in the Surtr’s Devouring Flame fight? You can bring along Formal Joachim and Halloween Sylas shared skills to apply a whopping three afflictions at once. Need Gala Emile to have respectable dispel capabilities to remove those pesky defence buffs in the Legend Lilith’s Encroaching Shadow fight? No problems for Gala Emile here either, who has the flexibility to output shared skills with dispels relatively quickly, or rock dispels with significantly more damage output. Need great burst options to take advantage of the broken state of an enemy? Simply use his summoned dragondrive skill, in combination with his buffed shared skills, to bring the pain to his enemies. Gala Emile brings such a significant amount of utility and flexibility to team compositions in water endgame content that you will always appreciate having one as an option. As such, I highly recommend summoning for Gala Emile, as he provided excellent support, utility and damage opportunities that allow you to have greater flexibility and experimentation for your water-element attuned teams in water endgame content.

Like all water-attuned damage adventurer’s, Gala Emile will benefit from the standard back line of a blade and dagger adventurer, who provide a strength and critical rate boost for him. Outside of these two picks, the final choice is flexible due to the lack of other strong water co-ability options to select. From a damage point of view, any perks that provide additional gains in dragon gauge, such as the dragon haste co-ability found on sword adventurers, or the dragon haste chain co-ability found on an adventurer such as Tiki would potentially allow him to output an additional dragondrive special attack during a boss fight. From a support and utility point of view, you may wish to run additional skill haste found on bow adventurers to allow him to fill his skill gauges even faster.

Assuming excellent uptime on the sole affliction that most of the water-element has access to (frostbite), and assuming an enemy is in a normal state during the fight, the following wyrmprint setup should be a good baseline to help further boost his damage capabilities in a fight:

• Bloody Little Queen (+14% Critical Rate (Wand))
• Any +20% Flurry Strength wyrmprint (such as Memory of a Friend)
• Wings of Rebellion at Rest (+25% Frostbite Punisher)
• A Small Courage (+20% Skill Damage)
• Chariot Drift (+15% Critical Damage)
• Any +20% Skill Damage Wyrmprint from Rise of the Sinister Dominion (such as Apple-licious Dreams)
• Any Sword Psalm III Wyrmrprint from Rise of the Sinister Dominion (such as Savage Hawk)

Gala Beast Ciella, as the most recently released water dragon, is at the top of the power chain when it comes to passive ability benefits to water adventurers. Her 100% strength passive boost, as well as a 15% punisher effect to frostbitten enemies, put her at the for front as Gala Emile’s best choice for now. The next best choice is Summer Marishiten, who provides a reduced 70% strength boost to water attunded adventurers, but a respectable 40% boost to the user’s skill damage, as well as filling the user’s skill gauge to 100% at the start of a quest. Gala Reborn Poseidon remains a solid choice as well for Gala Emile, who also provides a base 70% strength increase to water-attuned adventurers, and a further 30% boost to the elemental modifier against flame-attuned enemies for 45 seconds every time the dragon gauge fills by 10% (does not stack, 5 second cooldown). The best of the permanent dragon line up is Leviathan, whose fifth unbind provides a base 65% strength increase to the user, and a further ‘Surge of Strength’ buff, which increases the user’s strength by 30% for the first 3 minutes of a fight (immune to Curse of Nihility).

On summoning rates and wyrmsigils

• A Gala summon showcase provides a boosted 6% adventurer summon rate over the 4% summoning rate of standard summoning banners.
• As the sole focus of the banner, Gala Emile has a boosted summoning rate of 0.5%.
• Outside of Gala Emile, the adventurers Gala Audric and Gala Elisanne, as well as the dragon Gala Reborn Poseidon, are sparkable from this banner

Final Verdict: Wait for next banner preview

Gala Emile looks set to be another main stay choice for the water element, thanks to an excellent support and damage adventurer kit that is incredibly well rounded and hard to come by in this game. However, with the next banner promising to offer the adventurers Valyx and Phares as summonable options, as well as the lack of water endgame content until Primordial Brunhilda at the end of March, there isn’t an absolute rush to get him. However, if you have the summoning resources to spare, Gala Emile will definitely leave a lasting impact for clearing water endgame content.