Hogwarts Legacy Combat Guide – Tips & Tricks
In this Hogwarts Legacy Combat Guide, I want to share some tips on combat I’ve learned throughout my time playing the game. These are going to apply mostly to people playing on hard difficulty, but they might also apply to those having a hard time on medium difficulty as well.
Hogwarts Legacy Combat Guide – Play Defensively
So the first thing I want to say in this Hogwarts Legacy Combat Guide, is probably the most important point actually, is that you should Play Defensively when you’re playing on harder difficulties. This is because enemies can’t really hit you if you’re waiting for them to attack first and then you respond appropriately.
If you hit Protego when a yellow attack comes in or if you dodge out of the way of an attack when a red one comes in, they cannot hit you – and usually you can dodge out of the next one and you can Protego afterwards. There doesn’t seem to be a way for you to really get hit if all you’re doing is defending, so you should definitely play defensively – especially when you’re outnumbered.
This may be a bit counterintuitive. Usually, when outnumbered, the best strategy would be to try and eliminate targets to even the situation out -and that’s still a good strategy in this game- but you should do it while playing defensively.
Focus down one target while always ready to hit Protego or dodge. Interrupt your chain or your cast no matter what, if you need to reflect an attack. Just make sure that you play defensively, that is the best tip I can give you.
Protego
Since we’re talking about playing defensively in this Hogwarts Legacy Combat Guide, we’re going to talk a bit about Protego. Something really interesting about this is that if you cast it exactly when an attack is going to land on you, you’ll often reflect that projectile back at the attacker – so you can actually deal damage as well as further upgrading it to send out two projectiles in order to hit two different targets when reflecting.
This allows you to deal damage while playing defensively – a really, really strong perk, since playing defensively and dealing damage at the same time basically means you cannot die.
Mastering this is a good thing to focus on. Learning how to use Protego at the last second is a very good skill, and you should definitely practice this when you can.
Hogwarts Legacy Combat Guide – Breaking Enemy Shields
The next point I want to talk about in this Hogwarts Legacy Combat Guide is Breaking Enemy Shields. A lot of times enemies will have a red, purple, or yellow shield, and depending on your spell setup, you won’t always have the appropriate spell available to get rid of it. Or maybe your spell is on cooldown and you don’t want to swap spells.
Whatever the case, one really effective thing to do is fling objects at them. More often than not, this will break their shield thus allowing you to land attacks on them and grab them with other spells like Accio or Leviosa.
Learning to use objects within the environment surrounding you is something you definitely should focus on. Ideally, you can save them for shields and not just randomly fling – that is, of course, unless you can absolutely eliminate a target quickly.
Enemy Weaknesses
Enemies tend to have certain Weaknesses. If you’ve been playing the game for a while now, you may be aware that the game typically gives you challenges of sorts against certain enemies, and if you successfully perform these, you’ll learn what that particular enemy’s weaknesses are.
For instance, if you block the rocks that Trolls throw at you with Vertigo and then grab it really quick out of the air with R1 and fling it back, you’ll knock them down making them take increased damage for a few seconds afterwards.
Learning what these weaknesses are will better allow you to face these enemies in combat and is an important part of this Hogwarts Legacy Combat Guide. Pay attention to the challenge tips as you progress throughout the game, as they’ll teach you what spells are effective against which enemies, and how to do these really, really strong combo spells.
Ancient Magic
Another important thing I would like to mention is that we know Ancient Magic is really strong. If you’ve played combat at all in this game, you know that. However, there are a lot of enemies that usually take several hits of ancient magic before they go down – and even regular attacks unless you pull off one of the combos I mentioned before.
Still, ancient magic is the key to defeating them that a lot faster. Sometimes these enemies have, particularly on hard difficulty, a tendency to feel damage-spongy, so you really want to get talents that help you build up ancient magic more quickly.
Hitting enemies repeatedly without taking damage is how you typically get into magic. But there are some other ways you can do this – You can get a talent that makes it so when you successfully block on Protego, you gain some ancient magic buildup, or the “Ancient Magic Focus I” trait that increases your ancient magic meter fill rate. There is also one that makes it so that when you dodge an attack, you gain ancient magic buildup – or another one that acts when attacking enemies in the air.
Anything you can do to gain ancient magic build up can make fights go a lot faster. And also, as I mentioned before, it can eliminate a target out of a fight really quickly, so it reduces the numbers advantage against you.
Damage, Force and Control Spells
Another tip for this Hogwarts Legacy Combat Guide, and one that I would strongly suggest is having one Damage spell, one Force spell and one Control spell on your bar -that is, one red, one purple and one yellow spell- that way you can deal with these Damage Shields accordingly, as well as giving you a wide variety of ways to handle each situation.
You don’t have to do that since, as I mentioned, you can bypass shields by flinging objects, but if you’re just starting out and you’re wondering what’s a good spell setup, trying to have one of each those three colors on there is good. Your 4th slot can be for whatever you like, and then of course, you can obviously unlock more spell slots with talents.
Use Stealth
Stealth is extremely powerful. If you’re using the Disillusionment spell, you can go into stealth pretty much at will, and you can one-shot enemies with Petrificus Totalus as you move from target to target, wiping them out.
There are Talents that improve your stealth, which is great, and you can also make it so that when you use Petrificus Tatalus you will AOE, allowing you to kill multiple enemies at once if they happen to be next to each other.
Personally, I don’t really like to do this all the time because it’s not that much fun for me, but I do usually like to thin out some enemies beforehand with this so I’m not completely outnumbered while facing large groups.
Don’t Worry About Tour Gear
A really important tip for this Hogwarts Legacy Combat Guide is not to worry about the quality of your gear in the first 20 hours of the game or so. There’ll be time for this after you’ve unlocked the ability to create traits, so it’s not something you need to worry about right away.
Your gear will become obsolete before you can actually use traits – so you’d just be wasting your time focusing on Legendary Gear and whether you can use something like Tier 3 traits or not.
What you really want to focus on in the first 20 hours of gameplay is Stats. Focus on that number and ask yourself if you have more offense or defense with that particular gear – because it doesn’t really matter whether is green, purple, blue or gold.
Then, when you finally unlock traits -which will be very apparent to you because the game spells it out for you- you can worry about getting that gold quality gear that you can slot higher level traits into.
Traits
Once you can finally use Traits, you’re going to have to go and find some. The way you do that is by going to Collection Chests in Bandit Camps.
You clear out or sneak into the Bandit Camps and look for the collection chest there in which you’ll find a random trait. There are other traits you can get from doing challenges, but generally speaking, the ones in the collection chests are the ones you to want.
These will increase your damage while the other ones are defensive and, since you don’t usually plan on getting hit, you’re going to want the offensive ones.
However, they’re random, so you never really know what you’re going to get. You might have to look for a bunch of these before you get the ones you want. But, if you save before looting the collection chest and reload, it will have a different trait in there each time. Therefore, you can do this over and over again until you get the desired one – just remember they will drop anywhere from Level 1 to Level 3 traits.
And once you have one Level 3 of any of the traits you want, you can craft as many as you like, so you just need to get the one and that’s the recipe. That’s it, you only need to have one of each copy of trait in order to create as many as you want, and you can sort of cheat at getting them by reloading the game over and over until you get the ones that you want.
Final Thoughts
So these are the basic tips I found to work well with combat in Hogwarts Legacy. Hopefully, they will help you save some time as you focus on what’s really important depending on the stage you find yourself in, either being at the beginning of the game, or many hours well deep into it. These 9 suggestions should help you get the most out of your effort as you master the most relevant aspects of combat in Hogwarts Legacy. I hope you found this guide helpful, and stay tuned for more Hogwarts Legacy content, including relevant guides and builds!
For more Hogwarts Legacy check out our spoiler-free Hogwarts Legacy Review where after 30 hours of playing the game, we go over the overall experience. If you’re wondering when you can play the game if you didn’t pre-order or picked up the standard edition check out Hogwarts Legacy Global Release Times Explained. For all your magical needs visit our Hogwarts Legacy wiki for locations, guides, gear and more.
