This guide explains the best ways to quickly level characters and jobs in Octopath Traveler 2. Each method is broken down into the core parts of how they work and how best to use them.
The guide offers two strategies to follow. The first one will help you defeat fast and successful normal mobs. The second one is extremely effective against Rare Monsters.
Useful Support Skills for farming EXP and JP
The support skills of the various jobs in Octopath Traveler 2 play a big part in all of these methods. Below are the ones that are important for boosting the rates of EXP, JP or both.
While these Support Skills stack with each other, multiple copies of each Support Skill will not stack themselves. This simply means you only need a maximum of one of each of the skills below, unless otherwise noted.
Scholar – Extra Experience
This passive can be unlocked by Osvald, or by any character once you have access to Scholar as a battle job, and spend a total of 1,630 JP unlocking their skills. It’ll boost your EXP gains from Battle by 50%, being a source of consistent EXP gains.
While EXP will often be less of a grind compared to JP, there are still times when you may need it, or even want to push levels for the stats that come with them. That’s where Extra Experience comes in.
Dancer – Hard Worker
This can be unlocked by Agnea, or by any character once you have access to Dancer as a battle job, and spend 1,630 JP on skills to unlock it. Much like Extra Experience this also provides a 50% boost, but for JP.
JP is going to always be a looming grind, at one point or another, with most jobs requiring it to unlock the passive skills. This will make Hard Worker critical for unlocking a job fully, getting all of the job’s active and support skills.
Thief – Life in the Shadows
This can be unlocked by Throné, or by any character once you have access to the Thief as a battle job, and spend 4,630 JP unlocking all non-divine skills. This also adds an additional 75% EXP and JP gain for completing battles, but with the caveat that it only works for nighttime battles.
Life in the Shadows is a hybrid of Extra Experience and Hard Worker, boosting the gains of both. It’s also significantly more expensive and requires all of the job’s skills to be unlocked with the exception of the Divine Skill.
Hunter – More Rare Monsters (optional)
This can be unlocked by Ochette, or by any character once you unlock Hunter as a battle job, spending 1,630 JP on unlocking skills. This increases the spawn rates of rare monsters.
While not as consistent as the ones listed above, being able to see and defeat more rare monsters will significantly increase your EXP and JP gains. It’s optional because you’ll need to consistently defeat the rare enemies that spawn to make use of it. This is due to the super rare monsters like Caits and Octopuff Travelers awarding a ton of money, EXP, and JP for defeating them.
Merchant – Full Power (optional)
This can be unlocked by Partitio, or by any character once you unlock access to Merchant as a battle job, spending 4,630 JP and unlocking all non-Divine Skills. This will make the equipped character start with a full Latent Power Gauge.
This is optional, unlike the others. It has some niche, but practical applications. Most notable among these is using Ochette’s Beastly Howl to Debuff foes with reduced defenses and damage their shields.
Merchant – Boost-Start (optional)
This can be unlocked by Partitio, or by any character once you unlock access to Merchant as a battle job, spending 630 JP and unlocking Merchant Skills. This allows the character to start with 2 BP instead of 1.
This can be helpful for grinding, especially with methods that rely on one-shotting enemies. The Extra BP can often bump your damage up just enough to be able to
Casual Catapulting Method
As the given name of Casual Catapulting suggests, this relies on excessive use of the Inventor’s Changeable Catapult Skill. This is a skill that allows you to hit all enemies once with any physical damage type.
This is a great method for quickly leveling or even speedrunning the game potentially. It makes heavy use of one of the earliest special battle jobs you can get access to, the Inventor.
However, it’s worth noting this strategy is not very effective at dealing with Rare monsters, instead opting to focus on quickly defeating normal mobs. Rare monsters have absurdly high defensive stats which makes them hard to hit and only take single points of damage.
Requirements
Once you have the Inventor job, you’re pretty much set for the absolute requirements. You can prioritize getting characters or jobs with other useful passives, which does boost the rate at which this gains EXP and JP.
For more information on the Inventor job, check out our Inventor Job Guide. This Guide covers where and how to unlock the job as well as the skills it has available.
If you want to do this as early as possible, you’ll want to use Throné as your initial character. Not only is she the closest to the area you get the Inventor job, but she’s also the best at making it effective, especially combined with her Latent Power and Talent.
For Throné’s gear, you’ll want her to have the strongest Axe, Dagger and Sword you can find. Having Speed or Crit on these weapons is also a bonus. Any accessories that boost her Speed or Physical Attack can also be great.
Additionally, you can pick up Osvald and Agnea to get quicker access to Extra Experience and Hard Worker respectively. While you won’t get the useful Support Skills until they are roughly level 15 or so through standard play and grinding, these effects are hard to pass up.
Using the Strategy
All of the fights with this Strategy should take place at night, especially with Throné in the party. This is because her Blessing of Night Talent will boost our Speed and Physical Attack, allowing us to move earlier and hit harder in combat. Additionally, you can keep Temenos in your party, for consistent debuffs to enemy defenses.
We’ll be looking to hit enemies with either physical types that they are weak to, or our strongest weapon type out of Axe, Dagger, or Sword. These result in the highest damage possible from the catapult.
The goal is to simply one-shot foes, winning battles in a single use of Changeable Catapult, or bringing them low enough that additional AoE in the party can clean up.
The Changeable Catapult is incredibly strong for early-game and has the potential to scale very well. While most attacks will be able to deal a few hundred even with Blessing of Darkness, Changeable Catapult quickly jumps up to dealing 900+ damage consistently with early gear and a single BP.
Even as soon as you pick up the job, the skill will easily one-shot many enemies that you could encounter, all the way up to the point where the starting areas will stop scaling. The only time you’ll meet any resistance at all is when fighting foes slightly above your level. While you’ll still deal heavy damage, you won’t be able to take hits if you can’t defeat them quickly enough.
This strategy can easily net you 1000+ JP per hour, even in areas as low as level 15. Once all the support skills kick in this can easily increase to a much higher rate. This rate of course varies with enemy encounters and levels, as high-level areas will yield much greater EXP and JP gains.
A bit of a rough estimation for when I tested this method indicated I was actually gaining around 7,200 JP an hour in a level 15 area. Gaining between 60-100 JP per battle, at a rate of 2-3 encounters a minute meant getting at least 120 JP per minute. Of course, if you stay in a low-level area, your EXP will drop off fairly quickly, but JP rates tend to drop much more slowly.
Rare Monster Farming Method
Unlike the other method here, you’ll need a lot more time to set up this strategy, as it requires more Support Skills to be reasonably effective. Since we’re going after rare monsters, we’ll want everything can get to support it.
This is a bit of an RNG dependent, but an effective way to get the highest EXP and JP rates in the game. It’ll be tough to get going but once you do, you could be looking at thousands of EXP and JP per Rare monster encountered.
This was the go-to method of grinding out EXP and JP in Octopath Traveler 1, but I think just due to consistency issues, the Casual Catapulting Method above is much more effective and easier to set up. The only benefit this has is at the very end game, making it easier to push to absurdly high levels and overpower foes.
Requirements
You’ll ultimately end up with multiple jobs maxed out, whether or not they are in your party. Specifically Hunter, Thief, Dancer, Scholar, Merchant, and Warrior will be at or near max.
Thieves, Scholars, and Merchants aren’t necessarily needed beyond their Support Skills. Due to the high Evasion of Rare monsters, Scholars can be a reliable way to break them, should they be weak to an element.
From Hunter, we’ll be looking for them to have Leghold Trap, Take Aim, as well as their Support Skills, minus the Crit boost. This ensures we get More Rare Monsters, and have the chance to have the party get attacks and buffs off first.
From Dancer, we mainly need the passives, but if desired you can absolutely look to use Ruinous Kick to try to help with breaking. But you’ll only ever want to dump BP into casting Bewildering Grace.
This gimmicky skill can provide even more EXP and JP from battles, multiplying either by 2x, 5x, or even 100x their base. Additionally, there’s a small chance for it to even turn an existing enemy into a rare enemy.
Using the Strategy
One suggested party setup for this strategy would be:
| Character | Recommended Jobs |
|---|---|
Throné | Hunter Equipped with Full Power from the Merchant and A Step Ahead from Inventor |
Temenos | Scholar or Warrior Equipped with Boost-Start and Full Power from the Merchant |
Castti | Dancer Job Equipped with Boost-Start from the Merchant |
| Any Character | Equipped either to level or hold missing support skills |
Throné as Hunter makes the best use of Hunter’s first priorities, Take Aim and Leghold Trap. Leave No Trace allows her to set up both turns one, regardless or not if it’s an extra turn. Having A Steap Ahead from the Inventor will always guarantee that Throné will
This means the rare enemy will move last the next turn, so assuming they don’t immediately flee, you’ll have a good chance to take them out. Take Aim helps with this, to try and makes it easier for physical attacks to hit.
You’ll want to have as many support passives as you can in addition to Full Power, as this will be the main support for the group. Rare monsters have absurdly high defenses, so attempting to lower them, or boost your attack will not prove fruitful.
Temenos’ Judgment works exceptionally well for helping to break foes. You can make him a Scholar, who will use Advanced Magic the first turn, and just multi-hit spells after. Alternatively, you can make him a Warrior, who has Aggressive Slash right off the bat and hope RNG favors your ability to land hits, which Take Aim helps with.
Temenos will be your main damage source. Regardless of which option you go for, you’ll likely move after the rare monster and your support, meaning you can just come out swinging. If you’re running Warrior, you’ll want Boost-Start primarily for additional attacks with Aggressive Slash. While Full Power ensures you have Judgment at the start of every encounter.
Castti is filling the Dancer role and will want Boost-Start. You’ll just want to dump your BP on the first turn if you don’t get lucky with the extra opening turn. If you get the extra opening turn, You should use Concoct and look to inflict Sleep or another disabling status on the rare enemy.
Castti is only a recommendation here, you can just use this as a second filler character that you want to give JP if desired. Castti just has a little extra utility that can buy you additional time to setup.
Your EXP rates with this will vary heavily based on area level. At the high end, rare monsters will typically yield 2,000 EXP and 1,000 JP as a baseline. This baseline will be increased by all the passives and consistently yield around 4,200 EXP and 2,100 JP per rare monster defeated. If Bewildering Grace triggers, this will be anywhere from 6,300 EXP and 3100 JP, up to a whopping 200,000 EXP and 100,000 JP per defeat at the end game.
The rates at which you gain EXP and JP are incredibly variable, as you need to both find rare encounters and also consistently defeat them to maximize it. But even for early game, these monsters are well worth taking down if you can.
Optimized Octopuff Farming
This is a more optimized version of the setup above, that assumes multiple characters have trained multiple jobs to the point where they have the required skills. It also makes use of items that are hidden or can be obtained from Side Stories, like the Octopuff Pots to further boost encounter rates.
You could swap the Octopuff Pots for Cait Powder as well, but Octopuffs have a higher base encounter rate, at least while on water.
The easiest Octopuff Pot we can get comes from the Will Research for Money Side Story, which you get access to early on.
The easiest Cait Powder we can get comes from the My Beloved Catherine Side Story. Check out our guides on both of these side stories to help you quickly complete them.
This is our recommended party to maximize the effectiveness of this particular strategy:
| Character | Recommended Jobs |
|---|---|
Hikari | Inventor Required Support Skills: Full Power, Boost Start, A Step Ahead, More Rare Monsters Accessories: Octopuff Pot + Champion’s Belt |
Partitio | Dancer Required Support Skills: Full Power, Hard Worker, Life in the Shadows, Boost-Start Accessories: Octopuff Pots |
| Any Character | Holds remaining Octopuff Pots and EXP/JP/Money accessories or skills. |
| Any Character | Holds remaining Octopuff Pots and EXP/JP/Money accessories or skills. |
Using this Strategy
Ideally, to really maximize the value out of this, you’ll want Hikari to be strong enough to take down an Octopuff King, or whichever tier of Octopuff you have access to farm.
In this Setup, Hikari is our “carry”. We’ll be looking to abuse his Latent Power Shadow’s Hold for its Heinka ability. Hikari’s Latent Power abilities have high accuracy and deal high damage. While in some cases this can still fail to defeat them, it will be rare.
We’re also using Heinka for an easy way to reliably set up a backup strategy. Which we’ll use the extra turn to use the Inventor’s Springy Boots on Hikari to ensure we move first on the next turn. This next turn we’ll use Brand’s Blade which has a high chance of hitting, if not guaranteed.
Partitio is used in this particular setup to get two quick attempts at a powerful beneficial effect from Bewildering Grace. Thanks to Hikari’s A Step Ahead and Boost-Start, Partitio will have 3 BP his first turn. This is because the extra turn granted by A Step Ahead will count as a full turn passing, even though it’s just Hikari going.
When Partitio’s Second turn comes up, we’ll always have Hoot and Holler, thanks to Full Power. This lets us use Bewildering Grace a second time at max effect. Just be sure that if a negative effect occurred the first time, you use the other members of your party to heal up with items or abilities.
Overall, this strategy tends to be much more effective than the basic one, since you have a more reliable method for defeating rare foes. You can also opt for using a mix of both Octopuff Pots and Cait Powder, fighting on land instead of water. This will boost the chances of seeing both foes. It’s hard to tell whether Farming Octopuffs or both is better. Experiment with both strategies and see what is consistent for you.
As a result of this more consistent strategy, you will generally end up with high EXP/JP Rates over the basic setup.
This concludes this guide of how to level up fast and earn EXP and JP quickly in Octopath Traveler II. More strategies will likely be developed and shared in time, so check back later. If you have your own method and want to share it, please leave a comment below.
