Hogwarts Legacy bosses

February 21, 2023

With the Hogwarts Legacy release date in the bag, here’s our look at the bosses that feature in the game. While it isn’t going a melee action adventure like God of War Ragnarok, it still relies heavily on an advanced combat system, so there are some pretty challenging fights to take on throughout the game.

A lot of the gameplay footage and trailers before the release focused on the sightseeing side of things with a lot of emphasis on exploring and learning at Hogwarts itself. It’s a similar story with the rest of the huge open world setting, which has shown a lot of flying around the countryside.

However, there have been a few fleeting glimpses of the bosses in Hogwarts Legacy, but if you blinked you might miss them. The game is set in the Wizarding World, so we were also able to make some assumptions about other possible monsters and beasts that we could havet faced, so we’ll take you through that at the bottom of the page.

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Hogwarts Legacy bosses in order of appearance

Now that the game is out, here’s a list rundown of the bosses we’ve encountered in Hogwarts Legacy in order of appearance. It’s fair to say that the early big beasts are going to show up a number of times, with trolls coming in a variety of flavours, for example.

#1 Armored Troll

This brute shows up when you get to Hogsmeade for the first time. Use the surroundings to smash it with the ancient magic throw and just keep on blasting and you should be able to finish it off comfortably.

#2 Pensieve Guardian

There’s a lot of action in Legacy in between the first and second bosses, but there’s a lot to do a Hogwarts. You take on the Pensieve Guardian during Percival Rackham’s Trial, which you can see below. It’s a tough one to beat, but the key is dodging and firing the orb it charge up back at it.

Try using Leviosa on the yellow charge and Depulso on the purple ones. These do a lot of damage. You should also get in as many 10x combos in to build up ancient magic and unleash it to take off big chunks of its health. The final stages of Percival Rackham’s Trial will give you a lot of potions and you’ll need these to keep your health up if you get smashed.

#3 Forest Troll

This charging monster shows up not too long after Percival Rackham’s Trial as you try to track down a goblin relic to help Lodgok get back into favor with Ranrok. It’s essentially an all out fight with a variety of dark wizards in the mix, but the Forest Troll is the tricky one.

It can spam boulder throw, which you’ll need to dodge, because they come in thick and fast. This happens if you stay too far away from it, so roll forward towards it to avoid them and it should start charging and swinging its club instead.

Try to get it to charge into the rocks and this will daze it, so you can get in way more damage.

Cycle, rinse repeat and you should be able to beat the big boss, but you can see the learning process in the video below:

#4 Trial 2 Pensieve Guardian

In Charles Rookwood’s trial you end up coming face to face with yet another Pensieve Guardian, which adds in another move set to complicate matters. However, there’s a simpple solution to this and you should be able to beat the boss without taking any damage.

Dodge it’s sword strike and watch out for the sneaky magic damage that follows this, which you can Protego. Get in your standard shots to whittle it’s health bar down and build up your Ancient Magic meter.

When it charges up it’s bubble, fire back with magic that correlated to the color of it, which will send the charged shot back at the Pensieve Guardian. It then has a swinging mace shot, but if you save up your Ancient Magic you can interrupt this with it to deal huge damage and defeat it.

#5 Grodbik and the Fortified Troll

This group boss fight melee takes place during the Lodgok’s Loyalty quest about nine hours into Hogwarts Legacy. You have to take the lift down to it from the big central chamber and you’ll find a mini army of goblins led by the named goblin Grodbik and a tame Fortified Troll for good measure.

It’s a tough battle to make it through with so many enemies and then there’s the extra challenge of the damage sponge health bars of the two big bosses. Work on bringing down the numbers and use the Talent dodge to get away from them and potion up if you get hit.

Use crowd control measures like Mandrakes and the Talent buffed Incendio flame circle. You can also incapacitate enemies for a short period of time using things like Glacius and Transformation, which can also reduce numbers and let you build up for the Ancient Magic finishers.

The fight gets a lot easier with less Goblins and you should end up with just the Fortified Troll boss to beat. Use Flipendo on it’s club after it’s downward attack and and use your damage magic attacks like Diffindo and Bombarda to get in your big hits. Finish it off with your Ancient Magic and you should just about make it through this tough fight.

#6 Graphorn

You actually want to subdue the Graphorn to get it on side, but you’ll need to weaken it to get it to pay attention. When you first take it on it seems like it might be one of the toughest bosses in Hogwarts Legacy, but with the right tactics you can defeat it without taking any damage whatsoever, even on the hardest difficulty.

Have all of your damage spells at the ready to cycle through and hit it with all of the Ancient Magic throw options that are scattered around the place. The key is to use a Mandrake, which it seems highly affected by. You can super size this with the Talent upgrade for it and it’ll be down for long enough to rain down all of your damage magic options.

Dodge it’s attacks using the Talent buffed dodge roll, and always pull backwards for this to never get hit. You can see this in action in the video below, which should help you to perfect the move when it goes into its rampaging second phase.

If you have the time, or you’ve done the build already, Ancient Magic damage traits will give you a lot of firepower. You can see in the video the it can do upwards of 7,000 damage to speed on through the last phase of the boss fight.

#7 Dragon Ranrok

This is pretty much the final boss fight and while you will need to contend with Roockwood and his Ashwinders before this, it’s more a wave of enemies fight than a direct boss fight. Dragon Ranrok is what you get when Ranrok gets his hands on the ancient magic repository.

You’ll need to hit the energy orbs correlating the magic you use to the color, which will allow you to do damage on him. Use Talent boosted dodge to avoid attacks and then use Ancient Magic to hit him with big damage.

You will need to keep moving fast on Hard Difficulty and you’ll also need a good batch of potions to make it through. If you’ve got multiple magic slots then use these to double up on your efforts, but it takes a bit of skill to master. You can also think about dropping an Endurus Potion to help you through the tougher bits.

Teased Hogwarts Legacy bosses

To kick off our list of Hogwarts Legacy bosses, we’ll cover every big beast or high-powered named enemy that has cropped up on the gameplay footage and trailers. Some of this has included actually seeing the main character (the one you’ll get to create for yourself when the release date comes around) fighting them, but others have just appeared in cutscenes.

Mountain Troll

This big beast has featured a lot in all of the video footage for Hogwarts Legacy and it’s looks like it’s going to crop up a lot. You could argue that it’s just going to be a powerful enemy type, which would be fair enough, because it does re-appear in a number of different circumstances.

However, it’s health bar is way more solid than everything else we’ve seen in the game, so we’re treating it like a boss for now. Another counter-argument is that you can see them being one-hit killed with Avada Kadavra in the Dark Arts Arena footage that was recently released, but developers Avalanche Software confirmed that they were trying to keep the killing curse as it should be, so it may work on anything unless it’s blocked.

It looks like there’s going to be a range of different trolls to fight throughout the game. Some of them have ice attacks and others have trees and foliage growing on them, so there’s clearly a diverse range of troll with varying strengths and tactics a bit like the Ancients or Trolls in God of War.

It’s going to be a lot of fun fighting them, especially the tougher ones that we’re hoping to see later in the game. There’s an scaling system to enemy difficulty, so we should get some absolute tanks the further we get in the story.

Dragons

The God of War Ragnarok bosses comparisons continue with the dragons we’ve seen in the trailers and deep dives. As with the trolls, it looks like there’s going to be series of these with different strengths, potential elemental variations and attack patterns to get used to.

As mentioned above, there’s none of the close combat fun of God of War, so it’s going to be interesting to see how this works out for Hogwarts Legacy, which relies of ranged attacks. This was one of the criticisms for Gotham Knights, so the combat doesn’t deliver enough impact it could go on to be a negative in reviews.

That being said, the very fact that there are dragons in the mix is always something to get excited about. The flame-throwing behemoths we got to fight in God of War Ragnarok were epic, so the bar is pretty high.

Bridge Knight

This is another one of the Hogwarts Legacy bosses that has shades of God of War, but with such a huge game there was always going to be an element of influence on the rest of the gaming world. You can see the knight crouching down on the other side of a rebuilding bridge at the 4:42 point in the State of Play video below.

It looks a bit like one of the Travellers from God of War from afar, but with the ranged spell attack mechanics you’re clearly going to have a very different experience with this one. As with the trolls, it’s possible that it’s just a powerful enemy, rather than a named boss, so we’ll update things as soon as the release date comes around.

We do see the main character fighting more armored knights later in the video, but these look different from the the one on the other side of the bridge. In all fairness, though, trolls, dragons and Travellers were all repeated boss fights for God of War, so it doesn’t necessarily discount them just because we see multiple of them in the videos.

Powerful dark wizards and goblins

You can see a lot of dark wizard and goblin fights in the videos, but these are clearly just standard enemies. This will not be the case for all of Hogwarts Legacy, as there will be named individuals with much more powerful magic to face.

One of the main antagonists will be Victor Rookwood, the leader of the group of dark wizards at the heart of the story. There’s also Ranrok, the leader of the Goblin Rebellion, with the two appearing work together.

One of these could easily go on to be the final boss fight, but equally they could simply lead to an even bigger malevolent force later on in Hogwarts Legacy. If that isn’t enough, there will also be their hierarchy of followers with a few of them being possible bosses, so we’re expecting these to be some of the game’s toughest challenges.

Other potential Wizarding World bosses

If you’ve read any of the Harry Potter books or watched the Fantastic Beasts films then you’ll know there’s a lot more to the Wizarding World than just trolls, dragons, goblins and dark wizards. There are enchanted books of dangerous might, massive killer snakes that can slay you with just a look, and massive spiders and their hungry children to name but a few from the first two books in the series.

If you add in Fantastic Beasts, you’ve also got huge rhino-like Erumpant, ferocious Nundu, expandable Occamy and dangerous Swooping Evil from the first film. There’s even more in The Crimes of Grindelwald and The Secrets of Dumbeldore, so there’s a lot of scope for the Hogwarts Legacy bosses.

We’ll update you with more details on the boss fights as they’re confirmed. You can also check out our computer games section to keep tabs on the game. Visit the Hogwarts Legacy website at www.hogwartslegacy.com/ for more details.