Wand magic is like a phone that is so convenient it could almost do anything you want. So what magic/things do you think it cant perform or should be limited that other branches of magic like potions/herbology/rituals etc. would be needed.

What can/can't wandspell do on Healing? on teleportation? on warding?

Where should it be limited to balance its overpowered nature?

 

Most magical healing seems to involve potions, so the more pertinent question might actually be what wands can accomplish in that area. They can mend bones and close wounds to some degree, although Hermione still relied on essence of dittany to close up wounds when Ron was splinched. It's unclear if that was necessary because of wand limitations or if she just didn't know good wound closing spells that do exist, though. There might be other wanded healing applications I'm forgetting, but those are the obvious ones.

So it seems like spells can help alleviate straightforward kinds of injuries such as broken bones and skin breaches, but otherwise you're more likely to need potions to make other changes to the body such as alleviating blood loss or regrowing bones. As for why that's the case, it might have something to do with how potions combine multiple ingredients to get the effect they want. We know from HBP that adding this or that ingredient to a standard potion can modify its effects in predictable ways, such as alleviating the giddy side effects of that euphoria potion Harry worked on. It could be that to make major changes to a wizard's body safely you need to apply the effects of multiple ingredients simultaneously, while spells can only duplicate one such effect at a time which could be disastrous.

 

There are better spells which would heal completely (the dittany essentially sped up normal wound closure by several days) but Hermione isn't skilled enough to attempt them.

It also points out what I consider to be the main limitation of magic. It's difficult. There are of course, the exemptions to Gamp's law, the impossibility of revival from death and a few other limitations but most wizards won't even approach these limitations anyway. Harry, who scored an E on his charms NEWT, mixed up two spells on his practical. It took 15 minutes to vanish an iguana. Most ministry employees can't cast a good enough shield charm. So I don't consider it overpowered that a skilled wizard could probably heal themselves out of certain death because they're only so skilled because of years of study and skill that most will never approach. I think it also improves a story when most limitations aren't necessarily with the tool (wands) but with the characters using them.

 

I reckon that wand magic struggles with things that require a permanent application of energy.

For example, most transfiguration is a specific, one time focus of intent and once the match has become a needle, it stays a needle with no further effort. Charms on the other hand, are continuous effects, which require continuous focus by the caster. You can levitate an object with a wand, but as soon as you no longer focus on the charm, the object stops levitating. Most spells seem to fit into one of these two groups, be it a shield charm or a curse, or a summoning charm or whatever.

The gray area seems to be enchanting, which is a fairly difficult branch of magic. I don't really know where that fits, but then we don't know if enchanting is permanent either, so maybe they're just a charm tied conceptually to an object and given intent by the wizard, but not self sustaining forever without some kind of more permanent anchor which would be part of warding perhaps.

On this topic, I wonder if there's any difference in permanence between the protection spells that Harry and co. use in Deathly Hallows to hide their camp vs 'true' wards like the stuff on Hogwarts. Certainly the complexity seems different at least, which brings us onto the other limitation of wands. That you need to be able to imagine the effect.

A wand can conjure blood, but in a medical situation, you might not be able to accurately determine the specific amount, or the specific type required by the patient, so a blood replenisher potion is needed. The same with a magical portrait. You can animate a portrait with a wand, but unless you can imagine the entire personality of the subject and tie that to the portrait itself, you need to rely on other branches of magic. A ward stone with a personality imprint, magical paint mixed with pensive memories or some ingredient that promotes limited sapience (basically the potion Colin mentioned in CoS to animate wizarding photo's), whatever.

Here the gray area seems to be conjuration of animals, another difficult branch of magic. Personally I don't think you can conjure a person though, so maybe sentience can be swung if you're skilled enough and understand the concept deeply enough, but sapience is just too complex (or it's the soul factor?). Generally, this seems an area where it ties into skill of the individual wizard, where stuff that most people just don't understand conceptually, is understood sufficiently well by exceptional wizards that they can 'bend' the conventional rules of what's possible.

On the flip side, I think this concept is critical in a lot of potion effects. How can you accurately imagine 'luck'? Luck is a very nebulous concept that's hard to define or understand in terms of mentally constructing a spell, so you need to rely on a potion containing intrinsically and magically lucky ingredients to achieve that. Healing is also difficult to imagine in some cases. You can conjure blood, but it's hard to imagine what type, how much, where it should end up in the body, so a blood replenisher potion is used which contains ingredients that magically 'know' what's correct.

Again, it's not impossible for a skilled wizard to bend these rules a little and fix conceptually simple injuries (fix broken bone), but even these simple things are pretty difficult to acceptably visualize and are risky. By contrast, growing a bone, imagining the correct size, the correct composition, the correct placement, all the complex internal structure in such a way that the body doesn't reject it, is probably almost impossible to imagine. Instead you use Skelegro which uses the magical properties of ingredients to provide this information instead (some general subset of ingredients that promotes 'wellness' and is common to all healing potions to guide the activity of the other ingredients, say).

 

I guess wandspells cant create something permanently out of nothing thats why we need potions so we can use the ingredients to replenish what the body has lost. If its the case healing for wizard injuries would be easy and would only complicate if it interacts with curses.

It would be nice if dlp has its doctors or med practitioners to share what complicated situations wandspells couldnt do.

 

You might be right on enchantments, continuous application for magic requires focus that could be bypass with enchantments. Or situations like brooms which need multiple spells to maintain.

Im not sure about conjurations though. Isnt there a law about it not being permanent? That's why you should not be able to conjure blood and need potions for it?

 

Warding in hp is a bit vague. Spells like that should require focus to maintain right? or wandspells should be temporary that you need to cast it again after a day or hours. Ive read too many fics with anti-apparition spell thats too broken. You just cast it and everybody cant apparate unless you have portkeys. That shouldnt be the case at least make who cast it vulnerable in maintaining it or make an enchanted obeject to do it so if you need to escape you need to interrupt them or destroy it at the very least.

 

I don't think you need maintained focus, based on what we've seen, no. Temporary, maybe? I'd assume yes, but who knows. Magic generally isn't well explained in HP and it's not a hard magic system besides.

As for your other point, why shouldn't it be the case? HP isn't a video game with assumptions of fairness and balance to various skills. As you note, magic is almost universally OP. It's a story, and a children's / young adult story at that. If it fits the narrative, then yes, anti-apparition wards are absolute. You can write as good a story if they are, as if they aren't.

How would you like to approach the issue?

 

well my issue is every wandspell should have its counter or near it right? if it only requires wandwaving, why couldnt i counter it with wandwaving it? I guess it depends on the author on how to balance these things. But the point should be, potions, herbology, rituals, warding was invented because wandspells are not enough for every situation right? So why might it be? what are things too complicated that it requires these things?

 

To your first point, I can only say Avada Kedavra. Unblockable, except when it isn't.

But yes, it depends on the author to write characters who believably and consistently do or do not have the knowledge and experience to counter any given spell, be that through the use of another spell, or through other means. It does seem from the books that non-wand magics are not particularly dynamic or directly combat applicable though, except for niche cases.

I think there's some general 'rules' or at least guidelines for things that wanded spells can and cannot do that can be derived from Canon, but if you agree or disagree with my interpretation again depends on you.

Write HP magic as you think it should be written and so long as it's logical, consistent and doesn't blatantly contradict canon, you're probably good.

To your anti-apparition point, you can write as good a story where some things are either totally unbeatable or functionally unbeatable by your characters as you can write one where everything is neatly balanced and has a defined counter.

TL;DR, I'm not really sure what your compliant is here, or the issue you're trying to solve?

 

Generally, I don’t think there should be any hard limits to what wands can do compared to other kinds of magic.

Instead, I imagine that there is a softcap. Where it’s much harder to do it with a wand, but still possible.

So, sure a talented student can cook up a poly juice to look like someone... but a master transfiguration expert can just change how they look with human transfiguration.

Practically, there are all kinds of limitations because most won’t have the power/skill/knowledge to go past the softcap thresholds.

The exceptions:

I would headcanon that different species use different magic ( or that biology inherently shapes magic) and so humans using wands are limited to “human” magic.

Perhaps, a mystical artifact on the level of the philosophers stone could bypass such a limitation- but generally it would hold.

So, wizards cannot create a spell that does what dementors do. Similarly, a Dementer cannot grab a wand and cast Lumos.

However, I could see potions and artifacts bypassing this restriction. Especially if the potion/artifact is made of the animal it is copying magic from.

 

I like this idea of wands being able to do anything, but the spells being insanely difficult to cast at a high level. I think that when combined with a longer average lifespan, you could have witches and wizards conducting decade long studies into single spells or schools of magic and becoming immensely competent in that field. If you think about how long it takes to become a qualified doctor in our world, and then factor in the increased lifespans and potentially endlessly difficult spells of a higher level, then you might have people training for say 20 years to become qualified as a magical surgeon or whatever, with more complicated procedures requiring years more work to master.

It would be the same with aurors or builders or unspeakables or whatever. You'd end up with GPs who've been practicing for 100 years+ who could fully restore an amputated limb with a wave of their wands, transfigure brains to cure mental illnesses and vanish cancer. Ofc, these practitioners would be both very rare and could charge extortionate rates for their services if they wanted to.

 

What do you think about theoretical but practically impossible magic? Is it possible to come up with and prove the working of amazing theoretical spells that are practically impossible because of the difficulty/other practical limitations? Sort of like magical equivalents of space elevators. And do you think that there's some type of "technological" progress with magic that could make those practically impossible things practical, say, by creating a new type of wand with different limitations?

 

Well, you might have magic like apparation which is difficult but achievable for the average wizard when it comes to shorter distances being made nearly impossible when it comes to longer distances. The existence of so many alternative (inferior) forms of transport suggests that apparation is either impractical or very difficult to pull off when it comes to routine transport involving more than one person. So, maybe a particularly powerful or experienced apparator could perform intercontinental transport, or side-along apparation at the larger scale, and perhaps inter-planetary apparation is theoretically feasible but realistically impossible for the average witch or wizard, and there'd need to be some technological progress (e.g wands designed for performing long distance magic) to make it happen.

 

that’s how I think of it! And yup, I do think new inventions could make previously impossible magic, possible, after all that’s what the philosophers stone does. - and presumably that’s what the invention of the wand did.

We see very little spell creation, so it’s very hard to say how much can be proven theoretically. However, it seems to me like people can just create spells without fumbling about and failing, so I imagine they use theoretical knowledge to know what works and doesn’t- if not spell creation would just be trial and error. And it doesn’t seem that way, it’s not like there’s 1,000 copies of failed attempts at the mauraders map lying around.