Octopath Traveler: Session 8

I kinda live-tweeted the first portion of this session, so the first portion of this post will be a summary of that, with a few bits interjected because I didn't tweet everything.

I decided to make for Saintsbridge under cover of night to do Ophilia's Chapter 2, but on the way there I remembered that NPCs and side quests exist.  I found the artist whose last painting is necessary for a side quest elsewhere, and I found a shrine, which was actually the second one I found, but the first one I actually bothered to venture any farther into than the bare minimum to get its icon on the world map.  Turns out the shrines are how you unlock secondary jobs, and I should've continued into the first one I found, on the way to Stonegard.  Anyway, I now have Apothecary available as a secondary job.  H'aanit, Ophilia, and Tressa had a ton of JP sitting around from when I was being an idiot grinding JP for people one at a time, so they immediately learned all of the Apothecary skills.  Primrose was the one I was swapping out for that, so she learned everything but the Divine skill.  Satisfied with having done that, I left Ophilia as an Apothecary secondary (each job can only be set as one character's secondary job).  My thoughts immediately turned to "hey, I should go back to that other shrine...", but continued with "...after I get to Saintsbridge.".

After setting Ophilia's secondary job to Apothecary, she gained the ability to use axes in combat.  I didn't actually have a spare axe to give her, but as it turns out, the game has you covered if that's the case.  The character gains a "Makeshift Axe" weapon that doesn't have any stat boosts, but at the very least enables you to use the weapon in combat until you get to a town and buy something better.  Nice touch, that.  Apothecary as a secondary also doesn't grant access to the Concoct menu, sadly, because that's one of Alfyn's unique abilities.  Still, it allows a character to heal a single target and remove status effects, which mesh quite well with Ophilia being a healer.

Once in Saintsbridge, New Town Syndrome™ took over and I had to swap in Alfyn and Therion so I could run around and speak to, Inquire about, and Steal from every NPC possible.  Inquiring about some NPCs in Saintsbridge needs Alfyn to be level 35, and he was level 32 so I decided to visit the nearby area of Farshore to do some grinding, for both EXP and JP.  I haven't really been paying attention to where the best EXP gains are, but Carrion Caves JP gains are still best JP gains.  Got Therion the first five Apothecary skills before setting out.  Finished up a couple of the easier side quests and decided to go pick up more secondary jobs.

I now have access to Apothecary, Warrior, Merchant, and Dancer as secondary jobs.  I gave H'aanit the Warrior secondary, it just made sense.  She's a hunter, it's only natural that she might want to learn to wield different types of weapons to better help her while hunting.  I gave Ophilia the Apothecary secondary, as its single-target revive and status effect removal mesh well, and she seems to be taking a liking to swinging a giant axe around.  My party as I've been running around doing this has had Alfyn and Therion in place of Primrose and Tressa, Alfyn doesn't have a secondary yet (Dancer doesn't really make sense for his character), and I gave Therion the Merchant secondary.  This way, it's like he's peddling off his ill-gotten goods, which I kinda do anyway since I steal everything that isn't nailed down.

I realized that it makes total sense which secondary jobs are obtained where: it's the same as the starting region for the character with that job as primary.  Also, I finally got around to doing the most basic of math and figured out that it takes 9630 JP to completely learn a job.  I doubt I'll cut it that close, but it's nice to know if I'm going to have to be choosy or if I can just go down the list learning all the skills one by one.

Getting secondary job skills, levelling up Alfyn as a byproduct, and doing Ophilia's Chapter 2... next session?