Last week, we shared that Niantic, the company behind Pokemon Go, has just launched a location-based augmented reality game inspired by the Harry Potter franchise.
For those who have managed to download the application outside of Singapore, you may have discovered that this game is much more difficult to master than its predecessor. To help you cast Masterful spells and master (no pun intended) the game, we have collated the most useful tips that will surely come in handy:
Tips for leveling up
1. Brew your potions
In order to complete wizarding challenges and defeat difficult opponents, you will need potions. While you can earn potions from completing tasks, brewing them yourself is a better option – after all, you collect ingredients as you walk around, and your bag will eventually be filled with ingredients if you don’t use them.
Different potion ingredients will appear at different times, so make sure to watch carefully which ingredients appear during various types of weather, the time of day, and the moon phase.
2. Speed up brewing time by 15%
Playing Harry Potter: Wizards Unite can be a very time-consuming activity, so we appreciate any tip that can help us speed up the game play. Thankfully, there is a trick that will speed up your potion brewing by 15 per cent: Master Notes
All you have to do is go to your cauldron and tap the middle. Following that, you can enter a sequence of patterns to speed up the process process. The patterns include steps such as stirring counter clockwise, pinching the liquid, tapping it repeatedly and so on.
Each potion requires a different pattern that you have to figure out by yourself, but to take make things easier, you can tap on the “i” for information and see the patterns you can try.
And if you need a cheat sheet. We’ve found one that is super useful.
3. Get as much spell energy as you can
Spell energy makes the wizarding world go round – you need it to cast spells, foundables, battle, and progress in the game. You have a maximum of 75 spell energy at any point in time, and if you want to make sure it’s always full, you can get spell energy through the following avenues:
- Inns – just swipe and the meal or drink will give you spell energy. Inns restock energy every 5 minutes.
- Greenhouses – some of the plants will give you spell energy.
- Completing some assignments.
- Buy with gold – this is not highly encouraged, as you are wasting your gold.
4. Bonus spell energy free gift tip
We all love freebies, so make sure you collect your free gift in Diagon Alley as well.
You can get 50 spell energy in Diagon Alley (the in-app store) and scroll all the way to the bottom. The caveat is that it is probably only there for a limited time after you start playing the game.
5. Complete these everyday to earn gold
Gold can let you speed up brewing, buy potions or runes, and increase your capacity for spell energy or storage for ingredients. You will be given gold at the start of the game, but you can get more gold from:
- Completing your daily assignments
- Rewards for leveling up
- Reward for playing every day (so remember to login often!)
6. Pick your battles wisely
In Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, you get to choose your profession: Magizoologist (tank and healer), an Auror (which does high damage), or a Professor (good at puzzle solving). Aurors are better against death eaters, and you would want to pit Magizoologists against creatures such as erklings. Unfortunately, not much is known about Professors yet.
The main point is, make sure that you are fighting a battle that you are confident of winning, or you may be wasting your efforts.
7. Master the Registry and target your collecting
Discovering foundables may be exciting, but eventually you have to stop collecting the common ones that you often encounter, as it is a waste of spell energy. Instead, take the time to figure out what you are missing in the Registry and target those traces instead.
Tip: Some foundables come in fragments, so you have to catch them multiple times.
8. Watch out for highlighted traces
You will find many traces all over the map, with icons that indicate which categories they call into.
What you will want to look out for are traces with a highlight coming out of the top like a beam of coloured light. These are the more severe traces and are often rarer, but also more difficult, to collect.
9. Find your local greenhouse and grow your ingredients
If you find that your suitcase is filled with seeds but are not sure what to do with them, it’s time to find a greenhouse and plant those seeds!
Once you enter your local greenhouse, you will find a growing tab at the bottom of the screen. You can plant your seeds so that they grow into ingredients that you can use to brew potions (see tip 1).
Of course, you could grow your seeds in any greenhouse, but you have to make sure that you go back to harvest your ingredients. If other people are growing their ingredients there, you can actually harvest what they are growing as well!
10. Master the keys for portmanteaus
Tips for casting spells on Harry Potter: Wizards Unite
Here’s how you can stop getting “fair” and “good” and more “great” and “masterful” ratings.
11. Pay attention to a spell glyph’s specific shape
The straight spell glyphs are simple enough to trace, but some of them are much trickier: these are actually slightly warped so that they are flat at awkward points, so it does not work if you try to draw a circular shape.
Hence, it is best not to assume that you are always drawing regular shapes, and pay close attention to the symbol you are tracing!
12. Speed may be more important than accuracy
Besides how accurately you trace the spell glyph, another factor that comes into play is the speed at which you cast the spell. If you are too slow, you will definitely fail the spell.
There is also a green bar at the top of your screen that corresponds to Masterful, Great, Good and Fair levels of spell casting. The second you start tracing, the countdown begins and you have to finish the spell inside the top, smallest section to hit the coveted Masterful rank.
We’ve heard from some players that speed is of more importance than accuracy – so if you were to sacrifice one aspect, go for speed instead. Players we’ve spoken to said that they used to focus more on accuracy and get more “fair” and “good”, but when they speed up and compromise on accuracies, they achieved more “good”, “great”, and even “masterful”.
13. Red and black swirls when casting spells means you’ve failed
One way to tell if you have succeeded in destroying a confoundable is to look at the colour of your spells on the screen. If it is blue, it means that you are successful. However, if you start to see black and red swirls coming from your wand, it means that you have already failed and will not be able to get rid of the confoundable.
Best advice if that happens? Simply run away – there are some confoundables that are simply too difficult for new wizards to defeat.
Other general tips
14. Turn off AR
We know, the whole point of this game is to see the Wizarding World come to life in the real world.
However, if you are a serious player, it definitely helps to switch off your AR mode. Your battery power will last longer, gameplay is sped up, and it gets easier for you to do your battles.
15. Download all the game assets
Unless you have unlimited data and don’t mind a game that lags, we recommend that you download all the game assets on WiFi first. To download, go to the settings, scroll to the bottom, and you will see the option to download all the assets.
This process will take some time, as well as storage space on your phone (total game data is more than 3.5GB), so you will have to be prepared for that as well.
16. Save your portkey for play at home
Most of us may not have the time or energy to be out playing Harry Potter: Wizards Unite all the time, but that shouldn’t stop you from playing the game at all!
Portkeys can transport you to another place and require AR play to find items there. You can save and use a portkey to use at home, so that you can continue playing the game even when you are indoors.
17. Choosing professions
You’ll get to choose your profession at Level 6. While you can choose it based on your personal preference, you can also be strategic and pick a profession that you think can help you advance better in the game. Don’t worry if you regret your choice later; you can switch at any time (yes, and switch back as well). But note that you’ll lose benefits like stats and spells attributed to your original profession when you switch, and these can be hard to come by.
There are three roles you can choose from: Auror (deal damage), Professor (cast spells), and Magizoologists (healing).
If you’re very serious about the game, you may want to look for a community around the area you always play at, and coordinate so that you have a mix of all three professions in high levels.
Sources: GamesRadar+, Pocket-lint
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