Octopath Traveler 2 Apothecary Job Guide

This is an in-depth guide to the Apothecary job in Octopath Traveler 2. We’ll break down the Thief job including Skills and interaction with the other Jobs of Octopath Traveler 2.

What is the Role of an Apothecary

Apothecaries are primarily supportive characters, with the unique ability to easily remove Afflictions and prevent them with their Rehabilite Skills. Unlike the Cleric, they’re typically limited to single-target healing and damage.

In Octopath Traveler 2, Castti Florenz has Apothecary as her main role. Castti find herself waking on a ship with amnesia, with only her belongings reminding her that she was an Apothecary.

This ship docks in Canalbrine, where she helps with a mysterious illness using her skills as an apothecary. Afterward, she sets off on a journey to figure out who she really was.

How Apothecary Has Changed in Octopath Traveler 2

Apothecaries still play a very supportive role, but some of their skills have been merged into new skills, while they get an overall more interesting kit. Amputate and Empoison have been combined into the Poison Axe skill, while First Aid and Vivify have been combined into Healing Touch.

To fill the two new slots opened for skills, the Apothecary has received Weak to Poison and Replenish Health. Weak To Poison allows ticks of Poison damage to chip away at enemy Shields, allowing them to reliably break more foes. Replenish Health applies the Regen effect, which recovers an ally’s health with each action they take.

The Last Stand skill has been replaced with Sweeping Cleave, which makes it a less gimmicky skill that doesn’t require you to put the character in danger to benefit.

Concoct was also vastly improved, having been split into Harmful and Beneficial uses, both when activating the skill and the herbs you use for it. The game also tells you the exact effects of each herb as you select them, so you’ll know the exact outcome of your concoct.

Finally, there’s the option to Boost Concoct, which lets you mix up to 5 ingredients, for powerful healing and supportive effects, or additional ailments and damage types. With the extra addition of a herb that makes the effects apply to all allies or all foes, the Apothecary’s effectiveness has improved quite a bit.

Apothecary Skills: Overview and Recommendations

Like all classes, the Apothecary has both Active Skills and Support Skills that can affect their combat ability. Below you can read the overview and recommendations for each skill individually, followed by a segment with recommendations on which skills to pick first and why!

Active Skills

Active Skills are skills used in battle, to either attack, provide buffs, or apply debuffs. Below are the Active Skills available to Apothecaries. Apothecaries have access to Healing Touch and Icicle by default, the other skills require the use of Job Points, or JP to unlock.

Among the Active Skills are Divine Skills, which are powerful skills that are unique to each class. These however cannot be unlocked until all other skills have been unlocked first, which requires a large amount of JP, in addition to their own unlock cost.

Healing Touch

• Skill Type: Recovery
• SP Cost: 6
• Effect: Restores HP to or revives a single ally.
• Boost Effect: Increases the healing amount, or amount of HP the revived ally comes back with per BP Spent.

This is a very cheap and versatile healing skill. With it being a combination of healing and reviving, it’s very flexible in its usage. You’ll likely want to boost it when using it as a revive, so the revived allies don’t immediately fall again.

Icicle

• Skill Type: Ice
• SP Cost: 7
• Effect: Deal ice-based damage to a single target.
• Boost Effect: Increases damage per BP spent.

Icicle isn’t the strongest spell out there, but it still does decent damage. Apothecaries are decent with both Physical and Elemental Attacks, allow this to still deal decent damage.

Rehabilitate

• Skill Type: Buff
• SP Cost: 10
• Effect: Removes all afflictions on an ally, and prevents application of afflictions for 2 turns.
• Boost Effect: Increases duration of the buff by 2 turns per BP spent.

Rehabilitate is unique to the Apothecary, which gives them the unique ability to prevent status afflictions. Some afflictions can be annoying to deal with, like Silence or Terror, making this incredibly valuable.

Sweeping Cleave

• Skill Type: Axe
• SP Cost: 9
• Effect: Perform an Axe attack on all foes
• Boost Effect: Increases damage per BP spent.

Sweeping Cleave is one of the Apothecary’s few multi-target options, that don’t rely on the Concoct ability that’s unique to Castti. It’s not exceptionally strong, but multi-target attacks can always be useful for breaking multiple foes to quickly fill the Latent Power Gauge.

Poison Axe

• Skill Type: Axe
• SP Cost: 12
• Effect: Perform a powerful Axe attack on a single foe and inflict Poison.
• Boost Effect: Increases the damage and affliction duration per BP spent.

Poison Axe serves two purposes for an Apothecary, High damage, and the means to apply poison without items. The High damage keeps it effective on its own, while the poison makes it stronger when paired with Weak to Poison.

Replenish Health

• Skill Type: Recovery
• SP Cost: 9
• Effect: For 3 turns, grant HP to an ally when they perform an action.
• Boost Effect: Increases the duration of the effect by 2 turns per BP spent.

Replenish Health isn’t a super strong healing option, but when applied at a high duration, it can for a decent total amount. This is because it heals for a percentage of the target’s maximum health after each action. It reduces the need for constant use of Healing Touch or other healing spells while in combat.

Weak to Poison

• Skill Type: Debuff
• SP Cost: 4
• Effect: Makes a single foe weak to Poison for 2 turns.
• Boost Effect: Increases the duration of the effect by 2 turns per BP spent.

This will make each tick of Poison damage on a foe remove a single Shield Point. While the skill is very weak on it’s own, however with Poison Axe or another source of Poison, it becomes a way to slowly strip away an enemy’s Shield Points.

Divine Skill – Dohter’s Charity

• Skill Type: Buff
• SP Cost: 30
• Effect: Extends the reach of items used by a selected ally to all targets.
• Boost Effect: Requires maximum boost to activate.

Dohter’s Charity is an exceptionally powerful Divine. While extending the reach of items to all targets doesn’t sound that great, There are many powerful items in Octopath Traveler 2, more so than in the previous game.

Not only does this allow items like Reinforcing Jam to fully recover a party on every resource, but you can also use buffing items like those created by Ochette’s Prepare skill, or even items that can debuff or apply afflictions to foes. This makes it exceptionally versatile.

Which Apothecary Skills you should take first

Since Active Skills can be taken in any order in Octopath Traveler 2, it’s worth considering the benefits of taking each skill. The cost for the next skill increases as you pick skills, so take the time to plan which skills you’d want to make sure you never feel weak.

Without a doubt, Rehabilitate is one of the better skills to pick up early. This skill gives you unique access to the prevention of negative status effects. Poisons and Blinds tend to be fairly common even early on, and this help to deal with them easier.

If you’re looking for a more offensive-orientated skill, both Sweeping Cleave and Poison Axe are great options. Which one you take depends on if you prefer to have high single-target or weaker multi-target damage.

Poison Axe also works well if you’re going a supportive route, letting you also take Weak to Poison allowing you to slowly break any foe, even if you lack their weakness. This can be great for bosses that aren’t immune to Poison and have a lot of Shield Points.

Starting with Healing Touch generally means that Replenish Health is a pretty low priority. It’ll scale with the HP of your target, which makes it a little more useful later game. While it can still be useful early game, it doesn’t really feel powerful until you have a Dancer with their Divine Skill to apply the effect you your whole party.

Support Skills

Support Skills are passive bonuses that can be mixed and matched with Support Skills of other classes after unlocking them. Support Skills are unlocked alongside your Active Skills, being tied to the number of unlocked Active Skills for the class.

These provide stat boosts or other combat effects entirely passively and do not need to be activated beyond applying them to a character.

Vigorous Victor

• Total JP Cost: 130
• Effect: Restores 30% of the equipped character HP and SP upon winning a battle.

This is one of the best early support skills and remains good for grinding as well. This reduces the number of items you’d need to use to recover after a fight, if not entirely eliminate them for most encounters.

Hale and Hearty

• Total JP Cost: 630
• Effect: Increases the equipped character’s HP by 500.

This is the best of the flat stat increasing Support Skills. With HP being a very good stat to increase, as well as how powerful it is early on, this can easily be a great support until the late game.

Inspiriting Break

• Total JP Cost: 1,630
• Effect: Restores the equipped character’s SP when breaking a foe.

This can be a very beneficial effect for most casters, like the Scholar. Since they typically use a ton of SP in combat, this can help reduce the need for other methods of recovery, so long as they get to break foes occasionally.

Preventative Measures

• Total JP Cost: 4,630
• Effect: Grants the equipped character the Rehabilitate effect (preventing Afflictions) for 3 turns at the start of battle.

This can be super helpful for encounters and bosses that like to apply afflictions right away in combat. However, there are not a ton of these types of foes which can make the much more limited in its usefulness.

Apothecary Job Synergies

The Apothecary is unique in the way that you can do a ton of healing and a ton of support if you have the items to do so.

How Castti Synergizes with Other Jobs

By leveling the Merchant / Apothecary combo, you’ll end up with Full Power as an Apothecary. Full Power can be exceptionally good when used by Castti, as she’ll be able to use Every Last Drop every encounter for free healing, damage, buffs, or even status effects.

This combination can work with Scholars as well, since Concoct enables Castti to also very quickly check all three of a Scholar’s main elements. This can allow them to focus on setting up for breaking or damage much easier.

Check out our Castti Character Guide to learn about this character and their unique actions within the game. You can also check out our Walkthrough of their story, for hidden items in their story and boss strategies.

How Apothecaries Synergize with Other Jobs

By combining the skill of the Apothecary with those of the Cleric you get a very strong supportive job setup. With plenty of reliable defensive buffs, as well as cheaper revives through Healing Touch. There’s a lot of overlap in skills though, so it’s pretty far from optimal in most cases.

Since many of the Apothecary’s skills and effects are only single-target, this can give them great synergy with Dancers. This is specifically with their Divine Skill, Sealticge’s Seduction which enables a lot of these effects to be multi-target instead. In particular, this can allow Rehabilitate to easily shut down and prevent status effects.

Outside of another exchange of Support skills, the Apothecary doesn’t have any particular synergy with the Hunter job. Though Leghold Trap is still a great filler skill to throw at a boss where you might want to need the extra BP from the turn passing.

Merchant is an interesting combination of jobs with Apothecary as well, allowing you to use extra BP to either recover SP with Rest or evade physical damage with Sidestep. Additionally, you’ll be able to support your team with Donate BP.

Combined with the Thief Job, Apothecaries get access to additional supportive options, this time in the form of debuffs. In particular, the Thief’s high Speed can allow for easily preventing status effects by using Rehabilitate pre-emptively, rather than reactively.

Throné herself can be an exceptional Apothecary with her Latent Power in combination with Dother’s Charity. This can allow her to very easily recover herself and her party’s resources while remaining on the offensive or providing additional utility.

Warriors themselves aren’t the best combination of jobs, however, both jobs can potentially benefit each other’s Support Skills. Primarily, this would be Inspiring Break, Bolstering Break, and Latent Power Plus. Allowing easy breaking that also empowers you and fills your Latent Power Meter more.

As far as the advanced jobs go, Conjurer is one of the better options for Castti. In addition to the supportive kit she already has, she’s able to expand that potential and even add further options for increasing her party’s damage output. Additionally, she’ll be able to help with both SP and BP regeneration without relying on items or her Concoct action, saving them for when they’re absolutely needed.

Arcanist can also be an interesting option for a mix of support and damage. While she doesn’t typically have the highest Elemental Attack, she can still make use of Malice and Blessing as filler skills to help top off the HP or SP of her allies. Though outside of this, she doesn’t really have any strong combinations of skills.

This concludes our in-depth Job Guide for the Apothecary.