Octopath Traveler 2 Hunter Job Guide

This is an in-depth guide to the Hunter job in Octopath Traveler 2. This guide will break down the Hunter job including Skills and interaction with other Jobs of Octopath Traveler 2.

What is the Role of a Hunter

Hunters are mostly a physical damage-based job, and generally lack Elemental damage options outside of a single spell. However through their ability to Capture foes, they can expand their skill set to include a variety of physical attacks, elemental attacks, and even support options.

In Octopath Traveler 2, Ochette has Hunter as her main role. Ochette was raised by Juvah, the master of the beastmen living on isle of Toto’haha. Juvah says she’s destined to save the island from the calamity known as the Night of the Scarlet Moon. To do so, she must set out on her journey, finding the three Creatures of Legend which currently guard other regions of the world.

How the Hunter Job was Changed for Octopath Traveler 2

Hunter got a good mix of skills that stayed the same, while a few got changed. They still retain their Physical damage heavy features, but become more single-target focused. Of the Octopath Traveler 1 skills Leghold Trap, Mercy Strike, Take Aim, and Thunderbird remain unchanged.

Rain of Arrows was replaced as a starting skill by Precise Shot. Precise Shot itself removes the RNG that Rain of arrows had, though also cuts the number of hits down significantly.

For your hard-hitting single target skill, True Strike was replaced as well. Instead of your single hardest hitting attack being a Critical Bow Shot, it’s now an Axe attack called Cleaving Blow that can also grants you buffs.

Arrowstorm was removed entirely, being replaced with a brand new skill that doesn’t deal damage. Its replacement, Abating Orb gives you the ability to remove postive effects from enemies. It’s a strange choice of replacement honestly, but it does have its uses for some encounters.

Capture was significantly improved, by making it less tedious and reliant on Mercy Strike. Capture now has a 25% chance of auto-capturing a foe on defeat, so long as Ochette lands the final blow. All captured foes stay in your roster indefinitely, unless you replace them, or use them with your Prepare Talent

Hunter Skills: Overview and Recommendations

Like all classes, the Hunters have 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 Hunters. Hunters have access to Precise shot and Thunderbird 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.

Precise Shot

• Skill Type: Bow
• SP Cost: 2
• Effect: Performs 2 attacks on a selected target.
• Boost Effect: Increases attack count by 1 per BP Spent.

This skill can be exceptionally good for breaking foes, given that this skill is accurate and boosting it increases the attack count. It’s also “selected foes”, meaning you get to distribute the hits however you wish. When boosted, this means 5 bow attacks that can result in multiple breaks.

Thunderbird

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

Thunderbird isn’t the strongest spell out there, but it still does decent damage. Though it’s overall less effective due to Hunters generally being more focused on physical damage.

Cleaving Blow

• Skill Type: Axe
• SP Cost: 12
• Effect: Perform a powerful attack with an Axe and gain a positive effect based on the foe’s type.
• Boost Effect: Increases damage per BP spent.

Cleaving Blow is best used as pure damage tool. Often the positive effect won’t provide much, especially in short battles. Due to the nature of it dealing high damage, it’s already exceptional for bosses, and the positive effects might be more noticeable.

Mercy Strike

• Skill Type: Bow
• SP Cost: 4
• Effect: Preform a Bow attack on a single target. Otherwise lethal attacks with this skill will leave the foe with 1HP.
• Boost Effect: Increases damage per BP spent.

Mercy Strike is a skill that’s really only relevant for Ochette. This means it is easier to get the maximum capture chance on a foe using the Capture command. Though for more common monsters, there’s a fairly high chance of auto-capturing taking care of a lot of your capture needs.

While this can also benefit the Thief’s Steal and Merchant’s Collect abilities, these effects often don’t reward great value outside of being used on bosses or rare monsters.

Take Aim

• Skill Type: Buff
• SP Cost: 8
• Effect: Increases the target’s Accuracy and Critical for 2 turns.
• Boost Effect: Increases the buff duration by 2 turns per BP spent.

Take Aim is exceptionally good for ensuring you’ll consistently hit multi-hit skills. It won’t quite help with Blinds, but will otherwise make it easier to land attacks and have their crit. This can overall provide a boost to reliable damage and a slight damage increase from more frequent crits.

Leghold Trap

• Skill Type: Debuff
• SP Cost: 10
• Effect: Cause a single foe to act last for the next 2 turns.
• Boost Effect: Increases the duration of the debuff by 2 turns per BP spent.

Leghold Trap is exceptionally good for capturing or defeating Rare monsters. This powerful debuff will make sure they, or any foe, will act last. This means your entire party will be able to act before they can, resulting in easily defeating the foe.

Abating Orb

• Skill Type: Debuff
• SP Cost: 9
• Effect: Nullify 1 buff effect of a single foe.
• Boost Effect: Increases the number of buffs removed by 1 per BP spent.

Compared to the other options available, the Abating Orb feels very lacking on its own. Enervating Slash of the Warrior is cheaper and even deals damage at the same time.

Divine Skill – Draefendi’s Bow

• Skill Type: Bow
• SP Cost: 30
• Effect: Unleash a powerful Bow attack on all foes 3 times
• Boost Effect: Requires maximum boost to use.

While Draefendi’s Bow can deal a lot of damage, its strongest point is that it hit all foes. A properly equipped Hunter can still hit the initial damage cap with it, but it’ll still usually fall short of other damage options elsewhere. It can be a great last resort option to break multiple foes with shields, as it will often be more accurate than other multi-hit options, though with fewer hits.

Which Hunter 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.

Of all of the Hunter’s Skills, Cleaving Blow should be prioritized. This is one of your strongest single-target skills as a Hunter. This is because you’ll almost always have a higher Physical Attack stat over Elemental Attack.

Take Aim is great team support, but doesn’t provide a ton early due to your already low crit rate. Once you get better gear, it’s definitely worth having just for that extra bit of damage though.

Due to its effect, Leghold Trap can be worth getting fairly early. Tons of people underestimate how impactful manipulating turn order can be, and Leghold Trap is one of the strongest ways to do this. Don’t sleep too long on getting it.

While a skill with some potential, Abating Orb isn’t a great effect on its own. With support though, it can be incredibly useful falling just behind the Warrior’s Enervating Slash due to the lack of damage.

Mercy Strike is uniquely useful, but only to Ochette. While Merchants and Thieves can also benefit from keeping a foe at low health, Ochette benefits way more due to her Capture Talent. This gives Ochette and Ochette alone access to unique skills that she cannot get otherwise.

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.

Heighten Senses

• Total JP Cost: 130
• Effect: Increases the chance of acting first in battle. (This effect does not stack when equipped by multiple characters)

This Support Skill increases the chances of catching foes by surprise, granting an additional turn to the party at the start of a battle. This can be exceptionally good when fighting strong foes, or rare monsters.

It’s still a bit of a niche skill outside of hunting rare monsters though, despite how powerful it can be due to it being a chance-based effect that only occurs once.

Eagle Eye

• Total JP Cost: 630
• Effect: Increases the equipped character’s Critical by 50.

This is another of the flat stat increasing Support Skills, though unlike the other attributes like Physical Attack, this isn’t seen at the same high amounts until much later in the game. This means it can be an effective way to increase your critical rate for a long time, especially with some weapon types carrying less than others.

More Rare Monsters

• Total JP Cost: 1,630
• Effect: Increases the chance of encountering rare monsters. (This effect does not stack when equipped by multiple characters)

This can be an exceptionally good skill for grinding, as the super rare monsters like Caits and Octopuff Travelers award a ton of EXP and JP when defeated. If you can consistently defeat them, this can dramatically reduce any grinding you need to do.

Additionally, for Ochette these rare monsters also happen to be the source of some of her strongest supportive Captures. They often provide potent support skills that bost stats and provide unique effects.

Salt the Wound

• Total JP Cost: 4,630
• Effect: Grants the equipped character a 50% chance to act against after breaking a foe. This will not trigger in succession

When used well, this can easily be a very strong Support Skill. This can allow a character to break a foe, get a free buff on themselves if they can self-buff, then deal increased damage the following turn on the broken foe. In other situations, it can be a way to get off multiple powerful attacks, using one on the free turn and then another on the next turn with some means of BP recovery.

Hunter Job Synergies

Below you will learn which secondary Jobs best complete the Hunter as a starting Job and how the Hunter Job synergizes and performs best as a secondary job with other starting jobs!

How Ochette Synergizes with Other Jobs

With the use of the Warrior‘s Latent Power Plus Support Skill and Ochette’s Latent Power skill Beastly Howl, Ochette can recover a large portion of her Latent Power Meter if she breaks multiple targets.

Ochette works well with the Dancer‘s Divine Skill spreading her Precise Shot skill, making it a strong option for breaking multiple foes that are weak to Bow. Similarly, she can use this with Cleaving Blow for a powerful multi-target attack that will also apply positive effects for each enemy hit.

Check out our Ochette 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 Hunter Synergizes with Other Jobs

Pairing Hunter and Thief makes for an exceptionally strong combo for supporting, giving her a mix of buffs, debuffs, and strong attacks. In particular, she gains access to Swift Step, letting them debuff before their allies are usually able to follow up.

For a similar reason, Hunters can also make great use of the Inventor‘s Springy Boots skill. Since this skill enables you to always go first for subsequent turns, you’ll always move before your allies. Though the Inventor job itself is not a great pairing with Ochette and should be used by another character.

Combining the skills of the Hunter with those of the Dancer can also give a lot of power to control the flow of battle, by applying Leghold Trap to foes, or using Stimulate on allies to be able to shift turn order to the needs of the battle.

While Cleric isn’t a great option for Ochette, Hunter is a great option for Temenos due to his Latent Power. Temenos’ Latent Power, Judgment, can allow Precise Shot to quickly break foe(s) with less than 5 total Shield Points, as a fully boosted Precise Shot grants 5 attacks.

By using Warrior as a battle job, Ochette can become a strong physical damage-based threat. Having Warrior as battle job will boost Ochette’s Physical Attack in addition to covering four of the six physical attack types. She can also use Capture to help cover the remaining physical types.

For advanced jobs, Armsmaster is a strong option due to Ochette’s high base Physical Attack and easier access to the Salt the Wound Support Skill. This can allow her to be an exceptionally powerful breaker, while still having the utility of a Hunter. It also gives her access to additional non-beast multi-target options.

While not an extremely strong synergy by any means, Arcanist can allow Ochette to be a fairly good support for physical-based teams. This allows her to use Seal of Diffusion to share her Indomitable Beast skill, granting Physical Attack, Speed, and Evasion to the full party. Combined with Take Aim, she’s able to grant everything a physical-damage team would want, save for boosting defenses.

Conjurer is a bit of a more niche support option, expanding her utility but not really offering much else. At the very least her decent base Speed can help her move first in a lot of cases, allowing her to conjure an element for her party and have it be used the same turn.

Inventor is a fairly strong synergy, giving Ochette a great option for quickly capturing weak beasts for jerky through the use of Changeable Catapult. This is great as it doesn’t rely on the use of SP or the Full Power Support Skill to do well. In addition, it also expands her support potential, giving her multiple ways to manipulate turn order among other options.

This concludes our in-depth Class Guide for the Hunter Job in Octopath Traveler 2.