Fuck's sake Herbology is so busted. What were the devs thinking?

I'll never think about Neville the same way again.

 

Is it that strong? I used it more by accident trying to use a mount than I did in combat.

 

I'll put it this way. I have Herbology 3 crafted onto all six of my gear slots. The last several bosses I've faced have melted before I could even start casting my own spells after dropping a couple cabbages and a tentacula. I just finished beating a spider boss on a side quest and I never even saw its health bar before it was a corpse on the ground. A boss troll and one of the trial bosses were more or less the same deal.

Encounters that can otherwise take upwards of several minutes end in little more than a second.

Surrounded by dark wizards or goblins? Pull a mandrake and they're instantly gone.

Far and away the most busted thing I've seen. The only downside to it is the need to wait until unlocking the RoR to be able to replenish plants, and the startup costs some gold due to having to purchase seeds (and spellcrafts to have enough pots running to keep up with usage).

 

The three overpowered builds in the game are the gear enchantments Unforgivable, Concentration and Herbology. Choose one and slot it into all of your equipment.

Unforgivable has the biggest damage bonus multiplier, but spreading curses is slightly annoying. Getting all the curse talents makes it fine, especially the Crucio one. It helps that Crucio, Imperio and Avada Kedavra are incredibly strong spells.

Concentration boosts all of your red combat spells. But what really makes it broken is the specced Focus and Maxima potions. You can just put 4 red spells into your spell page, keep spamming the four in a rotation with zero cooldown, they all do quadruple damage and break all shields. It also makes you one-two shot regular enemies at max level with no potions, which is nice. But it does require the use of consumables for those peak moments of power. Good thing that crafting is so easy in this game.

Herbology makes your plants insane, and entirely capable of clearing mob encounters and killing bosses on their own, without you needing to really cast at all. However, again, it requires you to use consumables, so more frequent visits to the Room of Requirement. But growing plants is even easier than making potions.

I actually like how all the consumables are extremely strong and easy to craft - because I wouldn't be using them otherwise.

 

I honestly found myself having too much fun dueling the foes to want to be OP in that way - spellchaining my way through mobs was fun, even if I sometimes felt like my blasting or cutting curse should be doing more than slapping them around.

 

At this point I'm only using it when I'm surrounded and taking spellfire from my blind spots or when fighting trolls.

 

Honestly, your damage is so busted that it's hard to even spread curses with crucio - they just die too quickly. On Hard!

I would Crucio, then the target would just die in three R2s, maybe spreading one curse.

I ended up just ignoring the unforgivables and just using Exp, Flipp or Arresto to curse and set up huge Glacius/Diffindos on Executioners or Trolls, pop maxima and R2 / Ancient Magic everyone else.


But yeah, plants are the most broken. Just boring though.

 

It is great fun to Imperius the trolls that sometimes spawn in goblin camps and watch them beat the entire horde to death.

 

I just enjoy freezing shit then smashing it.

Though I'll not say no to a flipendo.

 

Clocked out at 55 hours. I didn't 100% the game, but was pretty close to it.

 

There is only 100% completion and those too weak to seek it.

 

Yeah, well, idgaf about finding more field guide pages and such.

 

But travel is so convenient after the invention of Floo Powder.

 

But what are you up to now?

 

Deek thinks you should be proud of all the people you've murdered.

 

It certainly seemed like nobody cared when I used Dark Arts. Natty complained when I used Cruciatus one time, but that was it.

 

Poppy sounded kinda into it ngl

 

Not surprising tbh. She kinda doesn't like humanity much in general, and the big stigma with the Unforgivables is about using them on wizards/witches. But I never got any lines from her about it.

 

It is a Pottermore thing but it's not presented the way Natty talks about it. By this point I've already beaten the game and haven't gotten a second character to charms class yet so I don't remember the specific dialogue but it was basically something along the lines of Natty getting used to the novelty a wand and liking how "dramatic" it is?

But according the Uagadou Pottermore article (now on the Wizarding World site) wands were adopted by African wizards as "useful tools" although they do still continue to cast spells with simple hand gestures

I don't if there's any short stories or anything that state which discipline is featured more prominently in the Uagadou curriculum but at the very least Natty should have already been familiar with wand casting prior to going to Hogwarts.

Or at least that's what I believe should have been case. Personally don't like it when wands are portrayed as "optional" and wandless magic as a viable alternative capable of casting all the same type of spells as wands

On the other hand I also don't like it when wandless magic is restricted the elite of the elite or it taking years and years to master a few wandless spells. I prefer a happy medium where adult Wizards can use wandless magic for casual or simple spells, and maybe a few decent ones as well, but anything particularly complex or powerful requires the use of a wand (so basically what we see in the PoA film)

 

I mean the “adopted in the last century” still checks out with Natty not being used to wands, since the game is set about 100 years before the books