I've been working on my actual patch for a while now (you can see all of the detailed changes
here)
But I thought it was a good idea to post what I've done with some of my research. I've managed to turn Piercing Sight and Aura into their own sections of gameplay rather than just curiousities that might get one look at and never used again. So in essence this post is about putting theory into practice (this is a repost from my romhacking.net topic on my patch but it displays in full the integration of Piercing Sight and Aura)
This update has been a bit of time coming. I always liked that The After Years made the Devil's Road (Serpent Road in this) into an actual area so I took my own interpretation of it.
The party of Palom/Porom/Tellah is highly unique in that there is a strong focus on magic moreso than anything, but the problem with the party formation is that it's only around for half of a pretty small area. I decided to let this crew tackle another area called the Serpent Road.
The unique enemies here are inescapable and each one has their own powerful tactics against the player.

The area is based around fake walls so there is a heavy element of trickery and because of this the place becomes labyrinthine with false leads and dashed hope (remember this Is a difficulty hack as well, hehe)
The enemies here are more geared towards this party, but I made one specific decision. Each enemy here would be resistant to Bio (Virus). Which will be the only spell in the game to be Immune Elemental. Which means that you may find it dealing 1 damage to some foes you might not expect it to.

You may find your weapons lacking in damage...

But there are ways around that! The unique enemies in the Serpent Road are mostly Mage types, which if Palom is sufficiently leveled or Tellah sufficiently geared he can cast the new spell Aura on Cecil and give him several Strong Against certain races of Foe.

This makes Cecil's damage go from that to this....
(Note: In this particular picture Cecil is using the Traveler's Knife which has a chance to cast Scan on hit which it did here, and that is why Scan is displayed as if Cast... because it was cast along with damage)
If you find your lack of strong damage against these foes as worrying, you may use Tellah's Piercing Sight spell to randomly change the elemental weakness of the foe!


Now it is weak to Fire which Tellah or Palom can exploit to the fullest!

With these new tools at your disposal the harrowing Serpent Road will still be a trek, but it is doable, make no mistake about it.
However this is the point in the game where the player should adapt to their new toys or else they will be outclassed by many manner of foes moving forward.