I continued with Sorcerer Ophilia in the wake of completing the collection of Chapter 1 stories. Up to this point I had confined Ophilia to the inner ring of the world map, at least aside from the quick jaunt out to Noblecourt. I thought that she was strong enough to start venturing further afield and decided to visit the town of Victor's Hollow next, another location packed full of goodies for a solo game. It takes a bit longer to reach this town with more random encounters faced along the way, however I discovered that pretty much all of the forest creatures in this area were weak against fire. Ophilia had a fine time roasting them with Ignis Ardere which was sufficient to defeat everything on a max boosted cast, and if it hadn't been, well, she could have simply launched another magical blast. Ophilia made it through two random encounters and entered the town proper where it was time to put Therion back to work:
The main treasure that I wanted here was the pictured Robe of the Flame. It has decent, if not great, physical defense paired together with the highest elemental defense value in the entire game. The Robe of the Flame also had the massive benefit of 56 additional spirit points (SP) which were badly needed to fuel Ophilia's sorcerous spellcasting. Along with the Stimulating Necklace that she had equipped in one of the accessory slots, Ophilia was benefiting from a grand total of 136 additional max SP, enough to boost her from a base 160 SP up to roughly 300 SP. She would be able to drop these crutches eventually as Ophilia continued to gain more max SP but for now they were essentially mandatory to keep from running out.
While in Victor's Hollow, I took the time to Purchase the stat-boosting nuts available from the town NPCs and complete all of the doable side quests. It's extremely important to keep feeding your solo character all of these bonus stats so that they'll be strong enough to face the endgame threats by the time that Chapter 4 rolls along. The side quests are also useful because they provide additional money which is always in high demand until the Octopath Traveler endgame. If you're wondering why I use Tressa to Purchase a lot of this stuff, that's because it's too much trouble relying on Therion to Steal everything. I save the thefts for the most expensive stuff since it can take a while to force successes at those 3% odds. For example, the Robe of the Flame had a bad sequence of RNG luck and it took Therion 61 tries (!) before he snatched the thing. The player has to quit and reload from a save file after every five failed steals and the whole thing is just tedious and time consuming. Like I said, worth doing for the really key items but better to use Tressa to Purchase everything else.
This is my traditional time to take my solo characters around to the optional side dungeons before embarking on the Chapter 2 stories and Sorcerer Ophilia was no exception. I started with the Whistlewood near Atlasdam and worked my way around the inner circle in clockwise fashion clearing these areas one at a time. The random encounters were definitely harder than what Ophilia had been seeing in the Chapter 1 dungeons while still being pretty doable for the most part. These areas were short enough and Ophilia leveling quickly enough that I could avoid auto-attacking and largely fire away with her elemental spells which would inevitably wipe out whatever she was facing. I worked my way through the Untouched Sanctum, Whistling Cavern, and then eventually on to the dungeons with optional bosses in Twin Falls and Carrion Caves.
These side dungeons were full of monsters and they were yielding roughly 50-70 job points per victory. Inevitably those job points started to accumulate and allow Ophilia to begin unlocking more of the Sorcerer class abilities, all of which were various attack spells keyed to the elements that she was missing. When she reached 2000 job points, I picked Lux Congerere for her next spell which was thematically appropriate as the light element-based Sorcerer ability. As the fourth Sorcerer spell, it also unlocked her first passive support skill named Intimidate: a 25% chance at the start of each battle for the opponents to begin with their physical and elemental defenses debuffed. Even though Intimate could trigger in any encounter, including boss fights, this wasn't very useful at all since the debuff only lased for two rounds. It was especially annoying because Octopath characters normally reach maximum boost points on the THIRD turn, one turn after Intimidate would run out. I suppose that this was better than nothing but it sure wasn't much to write home about.
Here's the full list of Sorcerer support abilities for the curious. I'll have more to say about them on this page as they quickly proceeded to unlock for Ophilia; as a brief overview, Stronger Strikes and especially Augmented Elements would be really nice to have while Elemental Aid looked to be more situational in nature.
There wasn't too much of note taking place in these side dungeons, particularly the ones with no bosses to fight. Ophilia looted the treasure chests in each one and this collection of side dungeons in the inner ring had a decent number of stat-boosting nuts to be found along the way. There were skeletons in the Untouched Sanctum that hit quite hard, which is why I had taken Lux Congerere to exploit their weakness to light element. One interesting tidbit took place outside Cobbleston while heading to Whistling Cavern: the very first random encounter had a Cait which Ophilia had to kill immediately before it could run away. This meant that the other three characters in the party (who had just revived at the inn) unavoidably gained the Cait experience and shot up to Level 13 which is why their HP/SP totals are a bit higher in these screenshots. I try to keep the rest of the group at Level 1 but I wanted that Cait XP for Ophilia so I simply had to live with it. She managed to find and defeat another Cait in one of these side dungeons (I think it was Whistling Cavern?) which was worth most of another level's worth of experience, very nice.
When it was time to pick a fifth Sorcerer skill, I chose the dark element-based Tenebrae Operire. There are very few sources of dark element damage in Octopath Traveler which made this a fun spell to have in Ophilia's arsenal. (It was also quite amusing to have her character hurling dark magic at the monsters for story-based reasons!) Tenebrae Operire also unlocked the next Sorcerer passive support skill Stronger Strikes which has one of the most unhelpful in-game descriptions that I've ever seen. What is that even supposed to mean?! 
Fortunately the algorithms guide clarifies it: normally hitting the weak point of an unbroken enemy does 30% extra damage. With Stronger Strikes in play your character does 50% additional damage instead, not bad. This passive does nothing against broken opponets (who always take double damage from all sources) but it was fantastic when hitting enemy weak points before breaking them. Ophilia was about to have access to all six elements which would allow her to hit a vulnerability of some kind against virtually everything.
Tenebrae Operire came in handy in several places as Ophilia seemed to be going through a portion of the gameplay where there were lots of opponents with a weakness to dark element. It was the one elemental weakness of these Giant Boars in the Path of Beasts who can often pose a real danger for solo characters due to their high attack value. Ophilia simply terrified them into submission with her newfound unholy magic. Dark element was also a weakness of the Monarch butterfly and Heavenwing, the optional bosses of Twin Falls and Carrion Caves. In both cases, Ophilia used her bow to knock off the shields of the bosses, then hit them with Elemental Break followed by Tenebrae Operire after the shields were down. It took two such castings to defeat both of these bosses who were moderately tough opponents. The Monarch knocked Ophilia into unconsciousness several times with its Numbing Dust while Heavenwing simply hit really hard with its Meteor Strike. Fortunately neither one managed to defeat her before Ophilia could drop them with her Sorcerer spells.
The wind-based Ventus Saltare was my next choice when Ophilia accumulated her next 2000 job points. I was well familiar with her elemental attack spells at this point and was more interested in the new passive support skill Elemental Aid. This ability granted 50% more damage to Ophilia's elemental spells in exchange for costing double their SP cost, up from 36 SP to 72 SP per casting. That was simply too high to be practical at the moment and I left the support skill toggled off with the potential to come back to it later in the game. Fortunately the player doesn't have to employ the passive skills if they don't want to do so - having to use Elemental Aid would be a pretty massive penalty at this stage of the gameplay.
Ophilia needed to start visiting some more of the towns in the second ring since that's where the Chapter 2 quests would be located, and I sent her off to Stonegard followed by Goldshore to take advantage of more equipment upgrade opportunities. Both of the towns had more side quests to fulfill and stat-boosting nuts to Purchase which continued the slow process of building up her character. Goldshore had the advantage of hosting weapon improvements, however, with the Wizard's Rod as a Steal target and the Forbidden Bow available to be Purchased. I took the time to save-scum a theft of the Wizard's Rod which was a huge increase in terms of elemental attack over the pictured Mage's Staff. Ophilia gained some 200 points of elemental attack just like that! The Forbidden Bow was an equally huge improvement to her physical attack which came with the side effect of increasing the random encounter rate. None of my previous characters had used this item and I didn't have a sense for how annoying that might be, I'd have to test for myself and find out. For what it's worth, the Forbidden Bow cannot be stolen and can only be obtained via Purchase which is why I had lifted the Wizard's Rod that had no such restriction.
The last optional side dungeon was the Hoarfrost Grotto which does have a boss at its conclusion, the Jotunn. The random encounters in this dungeon are on the tougher end for this stage of the gameplay, led by ice elemental monsters who were still dealing heavy damage to Ophilia even with her having the Robe of the Flame armor equipped and while being the character with the highest elemental defense in the game. Ophilia's response was to take advantage of the fact that everything in this cave was weak to fire element by toasting them with Ignis Ardere, over and over again, using Inspiriting Plums for SP recovery in between combat as necessary to ensure that she could keep wiping everything out. This very much included the Jotunn boss and its minions who all shared that fire weakness. Ophilia smashed the minions right away - the Sorcerer class is fantastic at anything requiring area of effect damage - and then needed some time to work through the 30k health on the boss. It knocked her down to a single hit point with its scripted Absolute Zero ability but otherwise this boss fight was pretty routine. Too bad the quest reward is completely useless, a weapon named that Calamity Spear that has a penalty to Accuracy on it, huh?
Ophilia unlocked her final lightning-based spell Tonitrus Canere in the aftermath of completing the Hoarfrost Grotto. She now had access to all six elements and had come fully into her Sorcerer powers. This also opened up the final passive support skill, Augmented Elements, with another one of those absurdly unhelpful tooltip descriptions. "Increases damage dealt by elemental attacks" - how much is that increase, how much?! The althorithms guide clarifies that the increase is 20 percent; why not simply state that?!? Anyway, the bonus damage from Augmented Elements was clearly visible in this next screenshot:
I had decided to start with Alfyn's Chapter 2 story sequence since it's an easy one and Ophilia had already taken the time to walk out to Goldshore. This picture was taken against Vanessa Hysel and her goons although it can be a bit tough to see what's going on given all of the light element effects on screen from Lux Congerere. I hadn't made any equipment changes or gained more than a level or two since the previous screeshot, however the damage against Vanessa's minions was around 2200 per tick of Lux Congerere as compared with about 1650 damage against the Jotunn's minions. That had to be the Augmented Elements effect kicking in along with slightly lower elemental defense on these opponents. Both of these battles were also places where Ophilia's Stronger Strikes passive was doing a lot of work, getting the 50% bonus damage against an unbroken target instead of the normal 30%. In fact, the Sorcerer as a class is less reliant on needing to break its opponents for this very reason. Breaking through the shields and dealing 200% damage is certainly nice but you can often make due with 150% damage when hitting a vulnerability. I'd have to keep this in mind for the more dangerous foes that Ophilia would have to face later in her journey.
As far as Vanessa herself, Ophilia blasted right through the initial minions and then wiped out the second group that the boss resummoned. Vanessa doesn't bring them back a third time which allowed Ophilia to apply the Elemental Break debuff and then hit with a boosted Tenebrae Operire for 4000 x 3 = 12,000 damage once Vanessa was broken. It was an easy battle as I'd expected it to be, only needing to remove poison when the boss inflicted it and occasionally pause to heal along the way.
I decided to travel to Quarrycrest next since both Tressa and Cyrus have their Chapter 2 stories located within. After taking a few minutes to run the various side quests and Purchase a few nuts, I started out with Cyrus' tale for a change. Everything in the underground sewers was weak to light element in this undead-heavy area which had Ophilia feeling a bit like her normal Cleric self. Lux Congerere was certainly stronger than her old Luminescence ability though I wouldn't have minded trading in the extra damage from Augmented Elements for the overhealing passive from the Cleric job. Gideon and his skeleton minions were once again also weak to light element and Lux Congerere absolutely tore through them. The picture above is a demonstration of some in-battle tactical use of the Sorcerer's skills. I took Gideon down to one shield remaining, then dropped a boost point into Elemental Break so that the effect would last for four rounds. That allowed me to break the boss with an unboosted Lux Congerere, with the last two ticks of the spell hitting him while broken, then land a max boosted spell on the following turn with the shields down and the elemental defense debuff in place. The Chapter 2 bosses don't have that much health and Gideon simply collapsed under that kind of punishment long before Ophilia could run out of SP.
Omar and his footmen minions didn't do any better, a relief since he can be one of the trickier of the Chapter 2 opponents. Ophilia hit them all with Ventus Saltere to knock the shields off the minions, then froze them all in their tracks with a max boosted Glacies Claudere that removed the footmen from the playing field. Once it was down to just Ophilia and Omar, she took advantage of his weakness to staffs to get the shield break using Elemental Break (which does count as a staff attack, remember) before laying on more elemental death. I had made sure to equip a Conscious Stone to prevent Omar's stunning ability and that was pretty much it for the fight.
I traveled to Saintsbridge next so that Ophilia could work through her own Chapter 2 story. She had accumulated enough job points by now to unlock the final Divine skill at a pricey cost of 5000 JP. This was Dreisang's Spell which causes elemental attacks by a single character to critically strike over the next three turns. I resolved to test this out during the boss fight against the Hróðvitnir to see if my initial assumptions held true, and, sure enough, this Divine skill really wasn't that useful. Dreisang's Spell certainly sounds great with that guaranteed ability for spells to critically strike, however that only means 25% additional damage in Octopath Traveler and most abilities seem to crit all the time by the endgame regardless. The effect also only lasted for three turns, including the turn of the casting itself, which left Ophilia only two turns of effectiveness before it wore off. I supposed that she could cast the Divine skill, then break the enemy, then hit with a max-boosted ability on the third turn - but then when would she have a chance to apply Elemental Break for the elemental defense debuff? I guess that it would work if the opponent had exactly one shield remaining while also having a staffs weakness which had to be a bit of a niche case.
No, the fact of the matter was that Dreisang's Spell simply wasn't worth the investment in necessary setup and boost points expenditure. I would much rather dump those boost points into Elemental Break to extend its length up to 8 turns in duration or simply blast away with more boost points placed into the elemental attack spells themselves. During this fight against Hróðvitnir, my testing found that Dreisang's Spell had the intended 25% increase in damage, with Ophilia hitting for 4000 x 3 = 12k damage with the Divine skill in place as compared with 3000 x 3 = 9000 damage without it present. Again though, she could have gotten the same results by using Elemental Break instead without needing to eat up those boost points. While the visual effects were certainly cool to see, I didn't think that I'd be using the Divine skill going forward as Elemental Break was just as strong while being far more user-friendly.
Now that she had all of the Sorcerer skills unlocked and most of the best equipment to be found at the second ring towns, Ophilia was starting to breeze through the remaining Chapter 2 stories without needing to expend much effort. I tackled Therion's tale next and this was one place where it certainly helped having accidentally killing that Cait for additional XP on the other party members. Therion at Level 13 had 15% odds to Steal most of the quest-related items rather than the 3% odds that he gets at Level 1 which greatly cut down on the tedium of procuring these things. (The Therion speedrun has an unavoidable 3% Steal at the very end of the run and it's a horrible RNG-fest that drives Octopath speedrunners insane.) Ophilia laid waste to everything inside Orlick's mansion and the boss himself stood no better chance of survival. His minions were hit with Glacies Claudere to knock off their shields followed by a max boosted Tenebrae Operire which wiped them out followed by wind and light element spells peeling off the shields of the boss himself. I captured the screenshot above of Ophilia using the lightning-based Tonitrus Canere which I think is the most impressive of the six Sorcerer spells in terms of visual effects. Orlick only has 31k health so two such castings with Elemental Break in place were enough to wrap things up.
Typically I save H'aanit's Chapter 2 story sequence for last since it tends to be the hardest but I figured Sorcerer Ophilia could handle it just fine. After teleporting back to Stonegard, she equipped an Articulate Stone while making her way through the Spectrewood dungeon since the forest denizens like to use silencing attacks. Pretty much everything in here was weak against fire and Ignis Ardere absolutely roasted the mushrooms and evil trees that tried to stand in Ophilia's way. If there's one problem with taking screenshots while playing the Sorcerer class, it's that the spell effects often block the view of everything else:
Like that, heh. The wave of flame coming from Ignis Ardere was so massive that it's barely possible to tell that this is the Lord of the Forest boss battle. (When in doubt, look at the portraits displaying the turn order bar at the top of the screen.) Once again everything was weak against fire element and the evil plants never stood a chance. I made sure to equip a Conscious Stone found back in Tressa's Chapter 2 story to block the stunning attack that the Lord of the Fire can do and otherwise kept casting Ignis Ardere. I was testing out a slightly different equipment setup here, forgoing the 500 HP from the Empowering Bracelet in favor of 100 additional elemental attack on the Elemental Augmentor. That was definitely less safe, operating with only 2400 max HP, but it did deal increased damage in the form of 6000 x 3 = 18k damage when the boss was broken and debuffed with Elemental Break. Even the 43k health on the Lord of the Forest couldn't hold up for long against that kind of punishment and the boss never managed to summon its second or third set of minions before perishing.
Most of Ophilia's random encounters followed the same script: use the Defend for the first two turns while accumulating boost points, then hit the monsters with whatever elemental spell they were weak against. This made for very fast combats and I was grateful for that since the Forbidden Bow was definitely causing the encounter rate to be higher than normal. It was draining her spirit points like crazy though since each fight required an expenditure of 36 SP even if that one spellcast wiped the field. However, I had a plan to help offset at least some of these SP costs:
I used Tressa to Purchase the Dragon's Scarf accessory from her mother Marina back in Rippletide which has the effect of restoring SP after each action in battle. It was a mere 6 SP per round and the effect did not take place if Ophilia's spellcasting ended the combat, in the same fashion as the Dancer job's Second Wind passive ability. That would have been awesome here since Second Wind gives back 5% of max SP each round which would have been about 18 SP for Sorcerer Ophilia! Even at this lesser effect, however, Ophilia would regain 12 SP during her two rounds of Defending before unleashing her elemental blasts for a cost of 36 SP. A net of -24 SP per battle was still much more sustainable than the previous -36 SP in each fight. This helped to cut down on Inspiriting Plum usage when facing less dangerous opponents and it was simple to switch back to Ophilia's real equipment for boss combats.
Rufus is one of the easiest Chapter 2 bosses and gets hard-countered by equipping a Conscious Stone to block his Pummel and Left-Hand Man stunning attacks. With that protection in place, Ophilia followed her standard playbook of ripping the minions apart with muticolored elemental brutality before setting in on the boss. Rufus was even weak against staff attacks which made things easier than normal: knock him down to one shield remaining, hit with Elemental Break to remove that shield, then let the magical energies fly. Tonitrus Canere worked nicely here and allowed Primrose to continue on her quest of revenge against the men who murdered her father.
The last remaining Chapter 2 story involved Olberic and took Ophilia to the arena in Victor's Hollow. After Challenging the would-be gladiators for a spot in the tournament, I finally regained control of Ophilia and began carving a path of destruction through the rest of the tournament field. Victorino and his pirate minions were all weak to dark element and couldn't stand up to Tenebrae Operire; Victorino didn't even have enough health to survive the first casting from Ophilia. Joshua was actually somewhat dangerous because I failed to equip a Clarity Stone to prevent confusion status and Ophilia hit herself once or twice with her own staff. He was weak to staffs though and couldn't last long when hit with the various Sorcerer spells. Archibold was much easier since he didn't have any nasty status effects to worry about. Ophilia simply rolled over his minions with Lux Congerere and then pounded him with ice element until he croaked.
Gustav was noteworthy mostly because he loves to use the Black Blade ability which inflicts terror status and I didn't have a Calming Stone to block the effect yet. In particular, Gustav will gain an extra action and use Black Blade at the end of every single round of combat after dropping below half health. My goal was to work him down to just above the 50% mark and then blast him into oblivion to avoid having to deal with that nonsense. The first order of business was removing his two Shield Wielder minions who can use a stunning attack themselves when they drop below half health. I brought a Conscious Stone into the battle for safety's sake though fortunately Ophilia managed to incinerate the minions with Ignis Ardere before they ever had a chance to use that move. For Gustav himself, I saved up enough boost points to use a max-boosted Elemental Break which would last for 8 rounds (knowing that some of them would have to be wasted clearing terror status) before breaking him and then hitting with Ventus Saltare because I hadn't captured a screenshot of the wind-based spell yet. The timing was almost perfect here; it didn't quite finish off the boss but did leave him in near-death status such that the next unboosted Ignis Ardere landed the kill even at a mere 900 x 3 = 2700 damage.
And apparently there was a fire sale on shields today because three of them dropped for Ophilia afterwards! 
Gustav's Shield is a guaranteed drop but the other two Spiked Shields are not. I had no use for the Spiked Shields, of course, this was merely an amusing little bit of RNG that I hadn't seen before. In any case, that brought the Chapter 2 stories to a close for Ophilia. She had all of the Sorcerer abilities unlocked at this point and these bosses had indeed been easier than the initial Chapter 1 set. When would the challenge level start to ramp back up again? Only time would tell as Ophilia continued onwards into the Chapter 3 tales ahead.
