You can teach John three abilities/spells. And it is important imo to teach him Light, Stone Mind and Brittle.
Now I know what you're thinking. "what's the point of Brittle?" well, it reduces a target's DEF for three turns. It might not sound like a big deal late game, but it is against some of the stronger greater demons you'll find in many of Richard's domains.
Not to mention it is MOST useful for the "reverse summoning" quest too. Especially against the final boss there, which I won't spoil for others.
Well, yeah, that'd be the ideal combo of spells to teach John in the long-run, but actually pulling that off on a Purity run is likely insanely hard. Getting Stone Mind to 2 is going to be expensive no matter what, and likely time consuming. Same with Brittle 2, because both of those require you to join Pasciel, and on a Purity run, you can only do that by paying 20k gold, AND you need another 2k just for the spells. Well... no... I think you could get Stone Mind 2 from that bitch with Slay the Demon... but that seems inefficient when Item Stance 2 is there and highly effective for Bomb Spam... especially since you can't get said skill from anywhere else at all.
That said, I don't remember Brittle being particularly useful for the Final Final boss of Reverse Summoning...
Pretty sure Clairedolus didn't have Rigid? And in the dual battle, you don't really need to beat Claire's armors, cuz Dolus is relatively easy to own by abusing Truthmaker's weakness. Of course, I might just not be remembering it right because I tended to abuse Acid bombs and Blessed Acid bombs on every boss fight basically.
Thanks. any advice on who to gift the other books to?
It helps a lot, I just wouldn't have realised that someone else could us the matk book better than Charlotte without actually getting to the lategame first, I think.
So I guess early on magic for Aura is mostly considered useful for setting up physical abilities, but later on that changes? Or is it that way forever?
I'll have to think about what to do, it does feel like I screwed myself timeline wise and I might not be able to scrap a win on d18 (not enough sharpened, not yet done armour upgrades as I was hoping for better mats).
Speaking of upgrade mats, what kind of mats are "good enough" to use, and is there a way to survive until you get the better mats, or are they nonstarters?
Let's put it this way, my late-game Aura could hit over 3k damage with Light 3 and Stone Mind 2 on Demons in Richard's domain. She could one-shot Wrath Demons, Greed Demons and Lust Demons and just about 2-shot everything else.
That said, my run wasn't 100% pure. So I had a bit more money to invest in things by sheer dint of the Alchemist Discount, learning spells for lewds from the sage, getting free Alchemist recipes from a store that opens later in the game. Etc. I kept things from having Aura get fucked by anyone other than George on Earth, but she sure got molested a lot, gave a bunch of handjobs, a couple of blowjobs
and got fucked by the slime, but Gooey apparently doesn't count as cheating.
So yeah, Mage Aura can
murder Demon enemies, but she'll have a hard time in certain other contexts. Like the Dragon optional boss... though on the other hand, she'll absolutely obliterate the Phoenix that you need to kill before said dragon, and the Phoenix can be tough for physical attacks to handle, especially since you running Lighting Blade there is hard.
On the OTHER hand, Rampage 3, if you can get it, is THE boss killer move with a bit of set-up. Break their armor, use Lightning Blade, debuff their defense, maybe use the super-stat-buff drug if you don't mind the corruption hit... and then utterly
obliterate the boss you land it on. It's theoretically possible to one-shot a number of bosses with Rampage 2 and 3 if you play things right.