It's been another half a year since the last time that I played Octopath Traveler and I felt the itch to do another solo game. We're getting close to polishing off the final solo challenges with H'aanit as the only remaining character out of the original eight, followed by one more venture with the last optional secret job in the form of the Starseer. As far as H'aanit is concerned, she holds the Hunter job in Octopath Traveler which is a physical attacking class as the name suggests. The Hunter class has a lot of utility while being outshadowed in physical DPS terms by the superior Warrior class brought by Olberic. However, H'aanit offsets much of this through her unique ability to Capture and then Summon almost every non-boss enemy in the game, turning her gameplay into version of Pokemon where H'aanit can to try catch 'em all. I delayed H'aanit's solo playthrough until the end because I knew that she would have one of the more complex paths, certainly in comparison to Olberic's "hit things really hard with sword" approach.
As a quick refresher for our rules in an Octopath Traveler solo game, the seven other characters will all be recruited (to allow playing through their respective storylines) but won't take any part in combat. The lesson that I learned from my initial Tressa solo game is that the Path Actions of the other characters also need to be included or else it locks out too much of the gameplay. So that's the rule for this game: H'aanit can use the other characters to Steal/Purchase items, Guide/Allure NPCs in town, and Inquire/Scrutinize random townspeople for quests, but none of those other skills can be used for combat purposes.
H'aanit is not one of the more interesting characters amongst the eight travelers that make up this game's core cast. She's an apprentice hunter training under her master Z'aanta who hears the classic call to adventure when he disappears on a hunt and remains missing for a full year. H'aanit is polite but serious in personality, very much a no-nonsense professional when it comes to roaming through the forests of her homeland and hunting down dangerous creatures that threaten the village. She is basically the straight man in a comedic duo with her master Z'aanta who we're repeatedly told likes to drink, gamble, and womanize. If you've ever seen any anime whatsoever, you'll be familiar with this stock character trope and Octopath Traveler leans heavily into it. It's a bit of a disppointment that we never get too much information about H'aanit herself since I think there's a lot of storytelling potential here about a young woman trying to emerge from the shadow of her teacher and stepping out into a much larger world than anything she's ever known. But we don't ever get much more than cliches and goofball tomfoolery in this storyline which leads me to believe that this is one that the developers didn't put much effort into.
H'aanit's Path Action is "Provoke" which is the companion ability to Olberic's Challenge, allowing H'aanit to fight random townspeople for experience and occasional item drops. Unfortunately H'aanit's version of the ability is *MUCH* more awkward to utilize as H'aanit herself doesn't fight these battles, instead she can only use her Captured monsters in these combats. (Oddly the player can use items in the Provoke fights but cannot attack with H'aanit or use any of her abilities other than Summoning captured enemies.) H'aanit can always use her giant cat companion Linde in these battles, which will be fine for a H'aanit solo game as Linde's damage scales with H'aanit's level, but it's horribly unfriendly when running anyone else as a solo character and H'aanit is sitting there at Level 1. I also really don't want to go out capturing monsters for use in Provoke battles when I'm doing non-H'aanit solo games, which again won't be an issue this time around. At least Provoke does have a minor edge over Challenge by lacking any level requirement to initiate the fights; I will abuse this in several places throughout the solo run. H'aanit's Talent is Capture/Summon which is how she collects these various monsters, someting that I'll be discussing a lot throughout the report.
These are the starting Level 1 stats for H'aanit. It's a real mixed bag as far as solo characters are concerned, with some excellent numbers here mixed with some troubling weaknesses. First the good stuff: H'aanit has the highest physical attack stat in the whole game, even narrowly edging out Olberic in this category. For someone who does entirely physical damage, that's pretty awesome! She also has the best Accuracy and Critical stats among the eight characters in Octopath Traveler, though both of these are less useful than they might sound since every attack seems to hit and go critical no matter what by the end of the game. H'aanit can also boast of having excellent evasion, tied with Primrose for second-best behind Therion, and I already knew that I would be doing an evasion setup for her in the lategame. Now for the tradeoffs: H'aanit's HP growth is only mediocre, equalling Therion and falling behind Olberic, Alfyn, and even Tressa. She has terrible physical and elemental defense, second-worst in the first category and tied for the worst in the second category. Long story short, H'aanit can dodge incoming attacks but she sure can't tank them. She's going to have to rely on evasion and bringing the correct items to survive against some of the Chapter 4 bosses.
H'aanit has two innate damage types: axes and bows. Between this pair, bows are vastly more important for H'aanit because she has half a dozen Hunter abilities that make use of bows and not a single ability that uses axes. However, in reality H'aanit has access to all twelve damage types in Octopath Traveler because she can Capture monsters that use every single type of weapon and spell. This is H'aanit's single greatest advantage as a character: she can never equal the raw damage output of Olberic but she's infinitely more versatile if the player takes the time to do the proper setup beforehand. In a way, it's almost a waste of time even discussing the abilities of the Hunter class since H'aanit will spend much of the game relying on so many different monster abilities instead of her innate class stuff. I'm going to have to do a lot of experimentation to figure out what works best in each new situation.
Here's what H'aanit's monster capturing looks like in practice:
The second menu option below Attack opens up this submenu where H'aanit can either use Summon Beast or attempt to Capture an enemy. Capture is a simple percentage-based dice roll which increases as the player deals more damage to the creature in question. My hunch is that this mechanic uses the same formula as Therion's Steal because the numbers seem to function the same way based on my non-scientific observations, that's just a guess though. A successful Capture functions exactly the same as a defeated monster, awarding money and XP and job points in the usual fashion. Once the enemy has been scooped up into H'aanit's Pokeball, they can be summoned a limited number of times to use some kind of unique ability in battle. At this point they become very similar to the Summoned townspeople that Ophilia and Primrose can bring with their Guide/Allure path actions, with two key differences. First, the Summoned Beasts will never block an incoming attack for H'aanit as they simply do not have this defensive function. That makes them weaker in one respect, but the second difference is an advantage: the Summoned Beasts only seem to have one ability each which they will always use when brought into combat. That's a massive edge over the Guide/Allure NPCs who frequently could do two or three different things in battle and it was unpredicable what they heck they would do on any one combat round. Given the extremely tight windows needed to land shield breaks on some of the Chapter 4 bosses, I think H'aanit's path action has the slight edge here.
Monster collection aside, H'aanit did begin the game with two innate Hunter abilities just like every other class. For simplicity's sake, here's the full list of all eight Hunter abilities, with the starting two listed at the top:
For a longer explanation of what all these numbers mean, I'll direct readers to this page in the solo Tressa game. As with all classes in Octopath Traveler, I had the opportunity to unlock H'aanit's non-Divine skills in any order desired as she accumulated more job points. As far as this overall group was concerned, well, let's just say that I had certainly seen better with some of the other classes in Octopath Traveler. The innate skill Rain of Arrows and the later skill Arrowstorm both did the same thing, hitting either a single random enemy or all enemies on screen with 3-8 attacks at low damage and low accuracy. These skills are unaffected by the Accuracy stat (another reason why it seems to be rather pointless) and always seem to miss at least a few times, making the number of hits more like 3-5 in practice. In fact, the damage from these skills was so low that they weren't much use in terms of actually hurting enemies, their real use was popping shields against bosses with weaknesses to arrows. These skills were almost identical to Olberic's Thousand Spears which I had also found little use for outside of shield breaking.
H'aanit's best non-Divine skill was her other innate choice, True Strike, which inflicted good if not great damage to a single target and would always critically strike. Crits only deal 25% higher damage than normal hits in Octopath Traveler and everything seems to crit by the end of the game so this wasn't quite as amazing as it might have sounded. Everything else was mediocre to poor on the list; Thunderbird dealing lightning damage on an otherwise purely physical class was little more than a joke, like Therion's fire element Wildfire ability on the Thief class. Leghold Trap forces enemies to take their actions at the end of the next few turns, something that I found to be really useful in a full party for breaking purposes but which felt vastly less useful for a solo game. Maybe I'll find a use for it on this playthrough, I guess we'll see. Mercy Strike would be useful for dealing non-lethal damage to monsters for capturing purposes, and then Take Aim was simply not a useful buff as H'aanit had no need for more Accuracy or Crit stats. I took Mercy Strike for lack of better options upon hitting 30 JP and there wasn't a whole lot more I wanted afterwards. H'aanit's Divine skill is absolutely amazing but she was a long distance away from that at the moment.
Back now to the actual starting gameplay for this character. I've discovered over time that increasing the starting defensive stats of a solo character is the best thing to do with the initial funds, and thus I purchased a Round Shield, Bronze Helm, and Bronze Armor in the town of S'warkii. (Everyone likes random apostrophes in H'aanit's home turf.) This raised her starting physical defense from 74 to 125 and that was a very big difference indeed. Then I went around clobbering all the townsfolk with H'aanit's Provoke ability and discovered that the local headman dropped a Medium Healing Grape, nice! I'd keep that 1750 HP heal in her back pocket for the moment in case it was needed. Anyway, it's worth taking a moment to discuss H'aanit's Chapter 1 story:
I almost always skip the story segments on repeat playthrough and it had been something like five years since I had actually watched H'aanit's full introduction play out. As I mentioned briefly above, H'aanit has a rather basic Chapter 1 story that doesn't tell us that much about her as a character. It begins with a flashback sequence to one year earlier when her mentor Z'aanta left the village on a journey to hunt down the mysterious beast named Redeye. After receiving a single letter from Z'aanta over the course of the following year, we return to the present with H'aanit fielding a request from one of the locals to defeat another creature that's been attacking travelers and slaughtering livestock. This turns out to be the rat-like creature known as the Ghisarma who has been needlessly killing wolves in the forest, which leads H'aanit to give a short speech about the Circle of Life created by the food chain, and how all life is connected to one another. It's all perfectly fine but not especially memorable.
What does stand out a bit more is the way that H'aanit and the other residents of S'warkii all speak using this faux-medieval version of English. As far as I can tell, the translator of the original Japanese text decided to make lots of use of "thee" and "thou" (which fell out of use in real English during the 17th century) while also unnecessarily ending a bunch of verbs with "en" and "eth" conjugations. There is some precedent for this, as Old English had a bunch of inflectional endings to various nouns and verbs which did sometimes make use of these forms. They even stick around in a handful of words in modern English, for example how the plural of "child" becomes "children" and "ox" becomes "oxen". However, the Octopath Traveler translator clearly was not a linguist with a background in Old or Middle English as these various "old-timey" sounding word endings are thrown around with no particular logic or consistency. I guess it's kind of nice that the game was trying to do a form of local dialect to show that not everyone in the world speaks the same way, but ultimately this is a gimmick that makes H'aanit sound rather ridiculous.
The Ghisarma was waiting for H'aanit deep in the forest for the first boss fight of the game. This is one of those tutorial boss encounters that players will have seen in other RPGs, with the "don't hit the enemy when it's ready to counterattack" mechanic that been around since the Mist Dragon in Final Fantasy 2/4. H'aanit didn't have to worry about getting counterattacked because, by coincidence, she had knocked the boss down to one shield remaining every time that the Ghisarma used that ability, and then she could simply break the boss normally which removed the chance for it to counterattack. This was mostly an opportunity for her to experiment with her Summon Beast option pictured above; Linde was always available with infinite uses, and then H'aanit could bring up to six additional captured enemies along with her for the fight. The interface here wasn't as helpful as it could have been, as it listed the damage type for each monster but not their 1-10 star level strength (Octopath Traveler 2 fixes this issue as it brings back the same mechanic on another character). I found through experimentation that the 2 star-rated Forest Fox did slightly more damage at 603 than H'aanit's own True Strike bow shot at about 560 damage. This was largely due to H'aanit still having the crummy starting bow which I'd be looking to improve upon. For the moment though, her summoned beasts were the stronger option and this proved to be a straightforward boss fight.
Afterwards, H'aanit spends a bit more time opining about how the Ghisarma doesn't need to feel bad about being defeated and killed, since now the wolves of the forest will devour its corpse and the cycle of life will continue. That was kind of morbid but certainly true, I'm not sure it was much consolidation for the enemy getting eaten though. Then H'aanit encounters the wolf companion of her master Z'aanta which leads to the decision to set out in search of him, ending the Chapter 1 portion of her story. Again, aside from H'aanit being established as having a stoic personality we just don't find out that much about her. You could swap out H'aanit for Primrose and there wouldn't be much of a difference here. I do like H'aanit as a character, I simply wish that she was more distinct as a character (notably all four of the male characters in Octopath Traveler have distinct personalities, I wish that I could say the same of the female characters).
H'aanit reached 100 job points shortly after defeating the Ghisarma and unlocked her next Hunter skill, with Leghold Trap being my selection this time around. This also unlocked her first passive skill so here's the full list of the eventual support options:
Heighten Senses increased the odds of getting a "first strike" round in combat before the enemies have a chance to react. I wish that the exact odds of this taking place were listed, and by how much they increased from having Heighten Senses in place, but I can't find this information anywhere in my various Octopath Traveler resources. H'aanit picked up enough surprise rounds for it to be noticeable as compared to other non-Hunter games that I've run, however this was still a pretty niche skill and not something that I would choose if other options were available. Eagle Eye similarly didn't do much at all since everything seems to crit by the end of the game regardless of what the player does. The last two support skills were much, much better and I'll discuss them later on when they unlocked for H'aanit.
As far as where to go next, I opted to take the counterclockwise route through the first ring by traveling to Bolderfall and unlocking Therion. It's practically mandatory to recruit Therion as soon as possible for a solo game so that the player can unlock the various purple chests scattered around the world. I took the Thief into Ravus Manor right away where he was able to open a chest with Wind Attire armor inside, something with slightly better stats for H'aanit to wear. I also discovered something surprising in the dungeon: H'aanit could not capture the Ravus Guard enemies! Apparently the developers took the "beast" portion of H'aanit's ability quite literally as she was unable to capture her human opponents in contrast to the other 95% of the opponents throughout the game. That was some serious attention to detail to bother with such a minor exception to the overall rule. In any case, Heathcote is the boss at the end of this dungeon and he's one of the easiest of the Chapter 1 opponents as he doesn't do anything particularly dangerous. I had H'aanit attack his weakness to bows and then launched a 4 star Venomous Fang from this pictured Laughing Hyena which hit for solid damage, even poisoning the boss for some extra pain. Two of these monster attacks while Heathcote was broken sufficed to knock him out of commission.
Having Therion on hand now allowed me to go crazy Stealing everything that wasn't nailed down in Bolderfall. Since this is Therion's starting town, he gets 100% odds to pilfer almost all of the townspeople and I happily took advantage of this. Amongst the stuff that wasn't a guaranteed steal, I save-scummed the successful taking of an Arcane Bow with 38 physical attack at 8% odds which took about a dozen tries to succeed. H'aanit's Provoke also allowed me to reach the old man behind a blocked door down in the southern part of the town, the one with a 10 star rating who has 2% odds to drop the Battle-tested Blade. Olberic wouldn't have been able to Challenge him until Level 50 but H'aanit could have committed suicide right now if I had wanted, heh.
Speaking of abusing character Path Actions, I continued in the same direction to Clearbrook next where there was a young woman NPC blocking a similar house. She's not tough to defeat with only a 3 star rating but has an obnoxiously high level requirement to use Olberic's Challenge, something like Level 20 or 25. H'aanit's Provoke had no trouble fighting this individual and knocking her out cold with Linde, followed by Therion slipping inside the blocked house and then endlessly using the Steal command until he was able to get this Golden Axe. I had unsually good luck here and grabbed it with about the eighth total steal, only needing to reload a single time. The Golden Axe was a totally ridiculous upgrade for H'aanit in the axe slot, increasing her damage from 141 to 384. She almost tripled her physical attack in the process! 
It was too bad that all of her Hunter abilities used the bow slot and not the axe slot, since H'aanit was still stuck with that Arcane Bow and its 38 attack for the moment. I was even able to complete the "For Want Of Fish" side quest after finishing Alfyn's Chapter 1 story which handed out a Mighty Belt accessory for another 50 physical attack. Whatever else you could say about H'aanit, she was certainly going to be hitting hard with that new axe.
I had a chane to test out the new weapon in the Cave of Rhiyo while running through Alfyn's initial story sequence. Almost everything here was weak against axes because that's the only physical damage type available to Alfyn, and of course H'aanit was hitting for immensely more damage than the developers would have intended thanks to that Golden Axe. She hacked apart the various bats and crabs and snakes along the way until reaching the boss at its conclusion. The screenshot above is a little blurry because the screen flashes when characters use multiple attacks, but that was indeed the Blotted Viper that concludes Alfyn's initial chapter. This boss brings along two asp minions and here's where I discovered another weakness of the Summon Beast ability: the monsters always use the same ability when brought into battle, however the player cannot target what they might hit with it. When fighting a boss with multiple minions, there was no guarantee that H'aanit's monster cannon would target the boss rather than its snake companions. This is a particular problem for the Blotted Viper since it will start stunning the player if its two snake minions are dead, thus it's imperative to keep at least one of them alive! For the moment H'aanit's auto attacks with the axe were dealing more damage than her abilities or her summoned monsters, thus I simply slashed away at a minion until it was dead, then repeated the process with the Blotted Viper itself. Enemy poison made this fight tougher, and I would have loved to have had an Antidote Stone accessory here, but this was still fairly easy.
Alfyn's Inquire ability unlocked some additional items for sale at the town merchant afterwards, and I opted to spend 16,800 money for an Elemental Light Armor. This would provide H'aanit with about 70 more points of both physical and elemental defense (plus 50 points of the useless Speed stat), which should be enough to secure her against any remaining threats in the initial ring of towns before I could venture out to Noblecourt or Victor's Hollow for better stuff. At this point, rather than continuing onwards to Sunshade and Primrose, I turned around and headed in the opposite direction into the Frostlands. I thought that this would be the more useful path as it would put H'aanit closer to Noblecourt, which is the easiest town to reach in the second ring and which contains a bunch of goodies for solo characters. Along the way to recruit Ophilia, H'aanit reached 500 job points and added the Arrowstorm skill from the list of Hunter options along with her second Eagle Eye passive skill. The new Hunter skill would prove useful against the next boss:
The Guardian of the First Flame is one of the hardest Chapter 1 opponents and I wasn't doing myself any favors by facing it as the fourth boss in order, the first time that the Chapter 1 bosses have their unadjusted stats in place (because the player has a full party for the first time). The Guardian itself didn't hit especially hard or have any nasty status ailments to work around, though it was a bit annoying that the thing wasn't weak to either axes or bows. Instead the problem was the Dark Wisp minions that the creature started summoning when it dropped below half health. These things initiate a 3-turn countdown once they appear and then explode for suicidal damage once it hits zero. That's a minor irritant for a normal party but it was an instant game over situation for H'aanit who didn't have enough health to survive all of them going off together.
Therefore H'aanit needed to kill all three of the Dark Wisps before they could explode and that was a problem because the Hunter class struggles to deal area-of-effect damage before reaching its Divine skill. The only ability that would hit everything on screen was the aforementioned Arrow Storm which was a poor choice between its high cost of 24 spirit points, inconsistent number of hits, and low damage output. This is getting a bit into the mechanics here but Arrowstorm actually hits for less damage than a normal bow attack (attack value of 0.65), increases the defensive strength of the target by 45%, and only gets 40% stronger for each boost point invested, such that fully boosting the skill only increases damage by 160% instead of the normal 300%. Basically this skill is supposed to be used for breaking enemy shields, not actually hurting them, but it was all that H'aanit had available at the moment since I didn't have any captured monsters that would work well here. I knocked the Guardian down to half health, then broke its shields (with summoned beasts that dealt dagger and ice damage), followed by auto attacking four times with the Golden Axe for close to 2000 damage. This minimized the time spent on the more dangerous second half of the fight where H'aanit used an unboosted Arrowstorm to break the shields on the Dark Wisps, followed by a max boosted Arrowstorm to kill them. I had to repeat this process a second time on a second round of summoned Dark Wisps, requiring a Medium Inspiriting Plum to restore SP along the way, in order to finish off this boss for good.
That was legitimately a tricky boss fight and I could have gotten stuck here for some time if I hadn't known ahead of time that H'aanit would need her Arrowstorm ability. In order to make things a bit easier going forward, I sent her over to Atlasdam to secure the fast travel option, then headed north through the Flatlands to Noblecourt in the second ring. The player typically has to survive one random encounter to make it there and that battle always seems to take place against a Night Raven and a Giant Sheep pairing. These two enemies frequently kill my solo characters and force me to try to run away from them, however H'aanit had no trouble defeating the pair. I think this was due to the fact that she was wearing a Wakeful Stone accessory which prevented her from falling asleep, something that I'll have to remember for the future since it made getting to Noblecourt so much easier.
Once she was there, it was time to cut Therion loose on the unsuspecting populace. The Impresario outside the town holds an Oasis Hat with extremely high defense values for this stage of the game, and it's always a 100% guaranteed Steal target for Therion. Since I lacked Tressa to Purchase stuff, I then had to rely on Therion to snatch an Empowering Bracelet (+500 HP) and the Imperial Vest with 120 physical defense / 132 elemental defense from a patron in the tavern. Both of those were 3% steal chances and would you believe that I actually landed them on back-to-back steals?! 
That really did happen, believe it or not. Then I went back to Atlasdam to get the Elusive Shield from another NPC at yet another 3% Steal odds, followed by needing 65 attempts to land the blasted thing. (And yes, the irony didn't escape me of Therion needing 60+ tries to get his hands on the ELUSIVE shield, heh.) It all added up to the collective stats seen here which were more than sufficient for H'aanit to complete the remainder of the Chapter 1 stories. She was even starting to dodge physical blows at a pretty good rate as her evasion climbed over time.
So what happens when a solo character starts to outscale the opposition with superior equipment? Well...
...it looks something like this. Russell is a very weak boss and I can't recall ever having any trouble with him no matter what zany variant I might have been playing. He launched his big chargeup attack and it dealt all of 1 damage to H'aanit, whoops. This is slightly misleading because if attacks aren't strong enough to get through the defender's armor in Octopath Traveler, the game rolls a random number between 1 and 10 and outputs that as the damage. So this could have been 5 damage or 8 damage or whatever, it just happened to look especially pathetic that poor Russell rolled the 1 value. I had brought along a pair of Ambling Bone summons since they had a sword attack that hit the whole screen, and they were useful for taking out the Water Wisp minions that were tagging along with Russell. I never healed H'aanit during this battle and I think she finished at about 1350 / 1535 HP which should tell you something about how not dangerous it was.
There wasn't much to write about when it came to the next character in line, Tressa's Chapter 1 story. The pirates in the Cave of Maiya were too weak to get through H'aanit's boosted defenses and she was dodging a good portion of the incoming attacks anyway. For Mikk and Makk at the conclusion of this short dungeon, H'aanit mostly relied on auto attacking with her axe since the opposing duo was weak enough that I didn't particularly need to rely on summoned beasts. I periodically broke out a captured Giant Sheep from the Noblecourt area for its 500 HP heal and otherwise hacked away until the two bumbling pirates were defeated.
I was already spending more time doing the various side quests in each town that H'aanit came across as compared with pursuing the actual story sequences. In particular, I was amusing myself by Provoke fighting all of the NPCs in each town, which is even funnier than when Olberic Challenges them because these poor townspeople invariably have some kind of dialog screaming in terror about how a monster is assaulting them. ("Are we the baddies?" 
) H'aanit's Provoke combats mostly function like Olberic's Challenges with a couple of unique oddball aspects. The biggest drawback is that H'aanit cannot attack or use any of her Hunter abilities; she can only use the Summon Beast command or use items. This theoretically makes her much more versatile than Olberic though with the annoying need to prepare whatever monsters might be needed ahead of time. It's also not possible to see if the text of the opponent has turned yellow (under half health) or red (under 1/4 health remaining) without selecting an offensive item for use, as picking the Summon Beast option instantly uses their ability. The user interfact isn't quite up to par for this aspect of the gameplay.
H'aanit can carry up to six captured enemies along with always having her cat Linde available as an option. Linde has some truly weird features that don't match anything else in Octopath Traveler. When selected, the game will choose either Sweep (a sword attack) or Pounce (a spear attack), with the player never getting to pick which is used. If the target already has a revealed sword weakness, then Linde will always choose to use Sweep, and ditto if the opponent has a revealed spear weakness. It also turns out that Sweep hits all opponents at once (while Pounce is strictly single target), something that I didn't even know until doing this playthrough because I had never used Linde before outside of a Provoke fight and those are always 1 vs 1 combats. Thus Sweep is almost always better to have Linde use, especially in random battles, and H'aanit effectively has infinite uses of the sword and spear damage type as well as her innate bow and axe access. It's the same old comparison I've repeated several times previously: Olberic does more raw damage while H'aanit has more flexibility.
While H'aanit was making her way through Olberic's Chapter 1 story, she hit the 1000 job point threshhold and unlocked the almost-completely-useless Thunderbird skill. More importantly, this also opened up the use of the Second Serving support skill which as listed gives the equipped character 50% odds to swing one additional time when auto attacking with their weapon. It doesn't matter how many boost points might be invested, Second Serving always has a chance to trigger and grant one additional attack. Thus one hits can double up to two hits, two hits can become three hits, and so on; obviously this is therefore more beneficial when kicking in from a single auto attack. It's therefore also a passive ability that tends to help with breaking through shields as opposed to dealing heavy damage itself, though of course the damage does add up over time from getting that extra hit. One minor tidbit: I noticed very quickly that Second Serving will never trigger against an enemy who would die from the normal auto attack damage, nice to save a little time like that. This is a very useful passive ability for a physical damage dealer like H'aanit though I do anticipate having to turn it off against some endgame bosses where shield break timings have to be very carefully managed.
Gaston was the first boss where Second Serving was available for use, unfortunately with much of the advantage wasted because he wasn't weak against either bows or axes. It was still useful though simply because H'aanit's swipes with her Golden Axe still dealt excellent damage for this stage of the game even if she couldn't get through an enemy's shields. Gaston turned out to be a bit of a joke because he lacked enought damage to punch through H'aanit's armor, hitting for a little over 200 damage with his big windup move Mighty Blow. That obviously wasn't going to cut it and while this boss has been legitimately quite tough for many of my solo characters, it was a breeze for H'aanit.
Last on the to-do list in the inner ring was wrapping up Primrose's Chapter 1 story and, well, she had simply outscaled this kind of threat by now. Helgenish did have a weakness to bows which made the battle tactics quite simple: auto attack with the bow and pick up some extra shield hits with Second Serving, then max boost either four hits with the axe or a summoned Highland Goat once the shields were down. Helgenish struggled to land his chargeup Know Your Place attack, which missed more often than it hit, and very shortly that was all she wrote for this loathesome individual.
Overall then, it was very much a case of so far, so good. H'aanit hadn't been challenged yet outside of the single boss fight against the Guardian of the First Flame and I felt as though I was starting to get a solid feel for her various abilities and playstyle. It was also fun to be back to a physical damage dealer after playing a series of spellcasters! We'd see if things started to get any more difficult in the upcoming Chapter 2 stories.
