The first set of Chapter 1 stories had essentially been an introduction to the Starseer class, involving little more than casting Shooting Stars at all of the bosses while trying to accumulate enough defensive stats to avoid dying in the process. Much more of the Starseer gameplay was about to start unlocking as I proceeded onwards into the Chapter 2 stories, though Primrose would continue to be limited by a lack of spirit points and insufficient funds to keep purchasing more Inspiriting Plums. I started out by sending Primrose north to Victor's Hollow for the first time where she was able to Steal a pair of new weapons. These were the Imperial Lance (180 attack) and the Divine Blade (152 attack) which I forced through a series of repeated attempts at Therion's dismal 3% success odds. Save-scumming those stolen items was a tedious but necessary tactic given the small amount of money that Primrose was working with for the moment.
Those new weapons were not intended for Primrose though, as instead I needed them to fill out the weapon slots for Olberic. I needed to get past the pictured Laborer with an 8 star Challenge rating who was blocking entry to a house in Quarrycrest, and Olberic was the only realistic choice for the task. There was a Level 20 requirement on Olberic to engage in the Challenge fight and therefore I actually had to invest some time in leveling up Olberic, which I did by beating the snot out of a whole bunch of other villagers with lesser Challenge ratings. The pictured Laborer made for a difficult fight as he could deal roughly 700-800 damage per round to Olberic and I had to hit the enemy with something like eight Cross Strikes to work through his health total. However, I had plenty of Medium Healing Grapes on hand and they allowed Olberic to win a lengthy drawn-out fight to get inside the blocked house. Inside was an Elderly Woman holding the Forbidden Spear which could be Purchased (Steal was not allowed) for a very nice 69,000 money. This was the weapon that I wanted for Primrose thanks to its massive 300 rating in both physical and elemental attack. There was a corresponding Speed penalty but that stat never seems to do anything in Octopath Traveler so it wasn't much of a tradeoff.
At this point I began my traditional process of visiting the optional side dungeons scattered throughout the first ring of towns. While I was in the early stages of exploring those areas, Primrose reached the 2000 job point threshhold for a second time and picked the Celestial Intervention skill. This unique ability protects an allied target from any negative debuff that might be used against them, or alternately can be cast on enemies to block any positive buffs that they might try to give themselves. Notably it does not REMOVE an enemy buff that's already in place, only blocks any new buff from being applied so the timing of the skill is pretty important to consider. While Celestial Intervention wasn't too important at this stage of the gameplay, I expected its usefulness to keep increasing as Primrose advanced into more dangerous locales.
Acquiring the fourth Starseer ability also unlocked the first support skill for the class. This was Hard Worker: gain 50% additional job points at the conclusion of each battle (the in-game text refuses to state the exact amount for unclear reasons). As with the Warmaster's similar Extra Experience support skill, the boosted job point gain applies to the whole party even with only one person having the skill equipped and it can't be stacked on multiple characters. Hard Worker had limited usefulness here in a solo game, since Primrose would quickly max out all of the Starseer skills regardless, though it did make a real difference in knocking out those expensive 2000 job point costs a bit faster. Random encounters like this one were already awarding more than 100 JP per battle which didn't take long to reach the next 2000 JP target.
Here's the full list of Starseer support skills:
I'll talk more about these individually as they unlocked for Primrose, however suffice to say for now that this is probably the best collection of support skills in the whole game. BP Eater and Divine Aura are both absolutely insane and turn into must-have passive abilities for anyone playing a nonvariant game, not to mention that Hard Worker will undoubtedly see a lot of use as well. For that matter, even Boost-Start was excellent when it came to random encounters:
Octopath Traveler's combat engine always starts out each fight with one of the player characters acting first, and for a solo game this is always the sole living character (barring a "monsters strike first" encounter of course). Normally, the player characters always begin each combat with a single boost point and therefore have to wait two rounds until reaching three points where abilities can be used at max boost. Thus it's quite common for my solo characters to essentially chill for two rounds and then hit the enemies with some big max boosted attack on the third round. Boost-Start changed up the basic math of these fights by starting Primrose with a second boost point. Now I could use the Defend command on the first round, which would move her to the front of the action queue for the next round, and then hit with a max boosted Shooting Stars at the beginning of round two. This worked shockingly well as Shooting Stars would almost always wipe the whole board if it was cast at max boost, thus leading to lots of extremely fast random encounters. Defend -> Shooting Stars, Defend -> Shooting Stars, Defend -> Shooting Stars and so on. It was repetitive but it was fast and easy and super duper strong. This was the model for nearly every random encounter for the rest of the whole game, even if the cost of resupplying SP with Inspiriting Plums was pricey for the moment.
Primrose was passing through the usual optional dungeons as I started in the Whistlewood and then circled clockwise around the rest of the inner ring. The skeletons in the Untouched Sanctum didn't seem to like the light element portion of Shooting Stars while the desert creatures in Whistling Cavern were more often vulnerable to the wind element portion. Two of these optional dungeons had bosses attached, the Monarch butterfly in Twin Falls and then Heavenwing in the Carrion Caves. It was during the latter dungeon that Primrose reached another 2000 job points (with them arriving very quickly now thanks to Hard Worker), where she learned the Ethereal Healing skill and more importantly gained her third Starseer support ability:
BP Eater has the worst in-game text description of any skill throughout Octopath Traveler: boosted skills deal additional damage. What is that even supposed to mean?! 
Fortunately the out-of-game reference materials tell the real story: spending boost points on *ANY* skill increases its damage by 50%, though it does not function on auto attacks. This is absolutely absurd and immediately slots BP Eater onto the short list of best abilities in the game, since virtually every skill conceivable wants to be used at max boost points. The elemental pursuit from the Runelord class is about the only thing that I can think of that doesn't involving spending boost points, and even the Runelord would still want this support skill since it synergizes so well with its Elemental Edge Divine ability. Long story short, every single class wants this support skill in a nonvariant game if they have any intention of dealing damage, as it makes everything else in the game much stronger.
Even for a heavily restricted variant character, BP Eater was still fantastic for Primrose. The impact was instantly noticeable as it increased damage by, well, 50% on every casting of Shooting Stars. Primrose was now hitting for roughly 2000 x 3 = 6000 damage against *UNBROKEN* enemies and nearly double that damage if I was able to break through the target's shields ahead of time. There's nothing in the inner ring of towns that can stand up to that kind of punishment; heck, even monsters out in the third ring would often die to those damage numbers! Primrose simply annihilated the opposition once she unlocked this extra ability, as in "break Heavenwing one time and then cast Shooting Stars for the instant kill". I'm not going to dwell on those opponents because the battles were little more than a formality; the Jotunn at the end of the Hoarfrost Grotto side dungeon was the only one who survived for any length of time, and then only because it had 30,000 HP and Primrose lacked a weapon to break its shields. She had exactly one skill that dealt damage and that was all that the Starseer class needed.
That wrapped up the various side dungeons which meant it was time to begin with the Chapter 2 stories proper. I started out with Tressa's tale which consisted of nuking every random encounter with Shooting Stars over and over again. I think that this produced a slight net negative in terms of overall income, with the cost of the Inspiriting Plums needed to fuel this spellcasting habit exceeding the money brought in from defeating monsters, but there were enough treasure chests along the way to stay in the black. Primrose was still gaining job points at an incredible rate, enough to unlock another Starseer skill (Divination) midway through Morlock's Manse, which also enabled the final Starseer support skill at the same time. Divine Aura was both simple to understand and insanely powerful: 25% odds to nullify any damage taken. That has to be on the short list of best skills in the game and I couldn't even begin to explain how good it was for a solo game. As solid as the Starseer active abilities might be, most of the power of this class lies in its ridiculous support skills.
I had the chance to test out Divine Aura against Omar, the boss of Tressa's Chapter 2 story. He deals strong physical damage for this stage of the gameplay, he has two minions that he can resummon infinitely, and he has a stunning attack that necessitates equiping a Conscious Stone accessory (which can fortuitously be found earlier in the same dungeon). My plan for this fight was to mix in some castings of Starsong for its defensive properties while cutting through Omar's shields with Primrose's spear blows, though the heavy SP cost of Starsong and Shooting Stars still rendered this a bit impractical. Divine Aura triggered on a number of occasions throughout the battle and completely blocked all damage from taking place, complete with the pictured shiny green glow whenever it appeared. Omar has a lot of health and he keeps adding more shields every time that he recovers from a break which dragged things out a bit. However, Shooting Stars was dealing 3900 x 3 = 11,700 damage once the shields were down and two such castings were enough to wipe the minions, with a third casting finishing off Omar as well. It was a little tricky without being too bad.
I had Primrose run through Cyrus' Chapter 2 story next since she was already in Quarrycrest. The random encounters in the sewers underneath the town can legitimately be pretty dangerous thanks to heavy elemental damage and a lot of terror status on the part of the monsters. The Defend into Shooting Stars combo continued to blow everything away though, with nothing being able to survive a max boosted casting. Gideon was the boss at its conclusion and he was surprisingly tough as Primrose wasn't able to break through his shields thanks to his dagger weakness getting locked out. Removing that protection required defeating the two skeleton minions of the boss, which took a pair of Shooting Star casts to accomplish only to see them come back again halfway through the battle. I lacked the accessory that blocks terror status from being applied which interfered with Primrose's boost point generation and Gideon's Executioner ability was hitting for some genuine pain. While Primrose wasn't in true danger of getting wiped out here, it wasn't the walk in the park that this boss fight often turns into.
I continued onwards to Primrose's own Chapter 2 story with Rufus the Left-hand Man as its own corresponding boss. Primrose tallied up the final 5000 job points that she needed to unlock the Starseer Divine skill along the way, and I decided to try it out against Rufus. Unfortunately Steorra's Prophecy was as underwhelming as I had expected, since the damage was based upon the total number of boost points held by the party at the time of casting and the other three characters were contributing a big fat zero. Even if those characters had been alive, the damage would have quickly hit the 9999 damage cap and been stuck there since the Starseer class has no way to get around that limitation on its own. It was better to use good old Shooting Stars for a result somewhere in the 10-12 thousand range even if it was somewhat on the boring side by now. Rufus was much weaker than Gideon and Omar had been, succumbing quickly to Shooting Stars and rarely seeming to land his attacks against Primrose.
Since I had already traveled to Victor's Hollow, I undertook Olberic's Chapter 2 story next on the list. I was actually trying to find a better dagger named the Legion Dagger here since it had a big boost to evade, thinking that I might be able to Steal it during the Olberic story sequence, only to discover that the dagger doesn't appear in Victor's Hollow until after finishing some of the Chapter 4 stories in the endgame, argh. This story sequence involves facing a bunch of opponents in the arena in a series of miniboss fights, each of which basically went the same way by having Primrose chain-cast Shooting Stars until the opposition collapsed. It was particularly annoying how the other three party members kept getting revived after each miniboss and then I'd have to kill them off again, especially Olberic who was up to Level 20 thanks to those earlier Challenge escapades and took some time to remove in each combat. Didn't he know that this was supposed to be a solo game?
Gustav the Black Knight had an improved shield with better evasion that I had Therion swipe before facing him in combat. Shooting Stars eliminated the two shield minions that Gustav brought to the battlefield before they could use a stunning attack on Primrose, and then it was time for an extended duel between the two of them. Gustav starts using an ability called Black Blade at the end of each combat round that inflicts terror status, and I was experimenting at using Starsong's evasion bonus to dodge that attack. It worked about 75% of the time with the Starsong buff in place and roughly 50% of the time without the buff, something that I couldn't maintain indefinitely because it simply cost too many spirit points. Gustav could never kill Primrose since I had plenty of healing items on hand but his frequent application of terror status did drag things out a bit. I also somehow forgot that Gustav was weak against spears and did the whole fight without ever breaking him - that dragged things out for no reason, sheesh!
Speaking of evading attacks, I realized that I could be doing more to lean into this stat with Primrose's equipment setup. I looked at the list of daggers and Purchased the Crescent Dagger since it held an additional 57 points of evasion. This weapon had lower physical damage than Primrose's previous knife and no boost at all to elemental damage on it, however I didn't need either of those stats since the Forbidden Spear was already providing plenty of both. Better to pick up a bonus to evade here since Octopath Traveler picks the best stats from each weapon slot. Then I also bought the Silent Cape armor, a real rarity of getting something useful from a store in this game, which had slightly lower stats than Primrose's previous gear but an additional 147 points of evasion.
The total result was to soar Primrose's overall evasion up above 500 points where it was very difficult for monsters to hit her. She was never completely invulnerable but it was common to experience random encounters whiffing 70-80% of the time. If they did get through her dodging, Starseer Primrose had another 25% chance to nullify any damage taken with her Divine Aura support skill, plus it even worked against elemental damage that can't be evaded. Since Primrose was also ending all of her random encounters at the start of the second round, I started seeing a lot of those "Untouched" notifications on the results screen. This bonus awards an additional 10% to the money earned if the entire party takes no damage, just like the 10% bonus to experience for breaking at least one enemy's shields. The Untouched bonus is usually quite rare for a solo game but I was seeing it frequently with the setup that Primrose had here.
And there were still the remaining Chapter 2 bosses to fight, not that they were causing many problems thus far. Orlick at the end of Therion's story was weak against spears and wind and light elements, making it easy to get through his defenses. Primrose cast Shooting Stars and dodged or nullified most of the damage coming her way - you get the idea. She ran into a Cultured Cait during a random encounter while heading towards Saintbridge (visible in the back corner above) and I found to my delight that a triple boosted Shooting Stars on the first turn of combat did indeed have enough damage to wipe it out without needing soulstones. I think that the spell did 18 x 3 = 54 damage which was more than enough to wipe out the 11 HP on that very rare enemy type. Within Saintsbridge, Primrose was able to buy the Silent Bandana, the helmet with the highest evasion bonus in the game, which I swapped over to using in most situations. She was now over 600 evasion and harder to hit than ever.
Then there was the boss of Ophilia's Chapter 2 story:
The Hróðvitnir is another physical-based boss who likes to buff its own attack while debuffing the party's physical resistance to hit for more than double the base damage amount. Starseer Primrose had a ready response to those shenanigans however: I could use Celestial Intervention to block the Sharpen Claws buff from the boss and prevent it from increasing its own physical attack. In fact, I was able to get the timing down well enough to block Sharpen Claws on three successive attempts in a row from the boss! When it tried to use Night Howl to debuff Primrose's physical defense, she could respond with Starsong to counter the penalty. The only real limitation continued to be the cost in spirit points though that was slowly getting better as Primrose's overall SP total grew. Offensively, Primrose could attack a spears weakness on the Hróðvitnir and then unload with Shooting Stars for close to 15,000 damage in total. Without the ability to stack up its buffs and debuffs, this was a breeze of a boss to defeat.
I tackled H'aanit's Chapter 2 story next in order simply because I had to pass through Stonegard before reaching Goldshore. The Spectrewood dungeon has a reputation for monsters inflicting the silence status, which wasn't an issue this time around because Primrose killed every foe before they could get off the status ailment. Well, OK, alrighty then. I experimented with using the BP Boost ability in the boss fight against the Lord of the Forest only to be disappointed by its performance. If Primrose cast it without spending any boost points, she would only gain 1 extra boost point on the following turn, then it would run out before awarding anything else above the default. If Primrose did spend boost points, she still wouldn't gain anything from BP Boost on the turn after boosting, argh! This was just not helpful for a solo character. Instead, I relied on Divine Aura which I discovered here not only blocks damage from taking place, but also stops any status ailments associated with the incoming attack as well. It's as if the blow never landed at all, everything gets nullified - amazing! Shooting Stars was highly effective at taking out the forest creatures summoned by this boss and they were mowed down in succession until the Lord of the Forest fell too.
I did notice one other oddity while finishing up with Alfyn's Chapter 2 story in Goldshore: Primrose was getting a lot of random encounters where the enemies struck first. This is normally uncommon and happens something like 5-10% of the time, yet on this solo playthrough I was experiencing it during as many as 50% of the random fights. The only thing that I can conclude is that the Speed stat factors into this determination in some way. Primrose had that big penalty to speed thanks to using the Forbidden Spear and I guess it was causing the enemies to get an extra surprise round way more often than normal. Not that this particularly mattered, mind you: Primrose would still generate a boost point at the end of that surprise round and then she would wipe out everything with a max boosted Shooting Stars anyway. This was different enough for me to mention it after having played this game so many times; it's too bad that I've never been able to find documentation on what the speed stat actually does in Octopath Traveler.
Primrose had been able to Purchase an Elemental Augmentor accessory back in Stonegard, an item that adds another 100 to elemental attack when equipped. Unfortunately most of the game's later bosses are too dangerous to waste an accessory slot on a luxury item like this, however Vanessa Hysel was unserious enough of an opponent that Primrose could bring it for this boss fight. With the extra power of that accessory, Primrose was able to hit for close to 7000 damage against Vanessa even without being able to break through her shields. I thought that Primrose would be able to push close to 20k damage if she could break Vanessa's shields (since enemy defense goes to zero when broken) but it was not to be: the two minions locked out any possibility of a shield break and Primrose killed Vanessa too quickly with repeated Shooting Stars before there was an opportunity to get the shields down. Oh well, that was certainly easy enough.
It felt as though Primrose was starting to become a true Starseer at this point now that she had unlocked all of her active and passive skills. She faced very little resistance while blowing through the Chapter 2 stories and continued to be limited only by a lack of enough spirit points to employ all of the Starseer's various abilities. I knew that the danger factor would have to start ramping up eventually but probably not for some time yet to come. In any case, it was on to the Chapter 3 stories next.
