Opinion: the gear upgrade and trait system are quiet useless...

[Waiwai]

I am at level 36 when I completed all side quests and main quests, at Normal difficulty in the entire playthrough, no unforgivable curses used.

Talent plan: Core -> Stealth -> Spells -> Room of Requirement

From the beginning of the game to the end of all quests, I can't even find a single reason to convince myself to spend extra time to upgrade the tier and trait on my gears, while the gear base level doesn't keep up with my level...

I don't find any combat nor any challenge would become impossible to best even I was using bad gears. Potion, learning all usual spells, weakness usage, plus using high stats gear without upgrade are enough to complete all game contents without getting stuck.

It would be better if the developer simply dropped the idea of gear base level, and focused on gear tier and trait... They made the gear system over complex rendering it becomes a burden more than a benefit when it comes to timespend...

Fandom talk aside, the combat system in this game is not bad for anyone gets tired with closed range combat with melee weapons in early and recent AC series, Middle-Earth series and Witcher 3 at high difficulty settings, and wants to change to mage instead, no action delay felt during combat in the entire playthrough.

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Game stutter issue and freezing are at killer level in this game, potentially becomes the main cause of death in combat.

I am using a 144Hz 2560 x 1080 px monitor with Ryzen 7 5800X, 32 GB 3200MHz RAM and RTX 2070S, and the game is running at 85 - 144 FPS (various based on locations and objects on screen) at 75% - 99% GPU workload with DLSS Balance after some unofficial fixes.

About game stutters and freezes affecting combat smoothness, these unofficial solution works for me, at least it eases the screen stutter to a level seems to be disappeared completely:

Add this to to "C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\Hogwarts Legacy\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor\Engine.ini":
(Backup the file before you do the change)

[SystemSettings]
r.bForceCPUAccessToGPUSkinVerts=True
r.GTSyncType=1
r.OneFrameThreadLag=1
r.FinishCurrentFrame=0
r.TextureStreaming=1
r.Streaming.LimitPoolSizeToVRAM=1

[ConsoleVariables]
AllowAsyncRenderThreadUpdates=1
AllowAsyncRenderThreadUpdatesDuringGamethreadUpdates=1
AllowAsyncRenderThreadUpdatesEditor=1

Additional for RTX GPU serie users, unofficial solution:

Update the DLSS profile to the latest version manually. DLSS profile can be found on: https://www.techpowerup.com/download/nvidia-dlss-dll/

Framerate settings:

Set your in-game framerate limit to same as your machine framerate limit.

[Gaze73]

I don't get threads like this. If you find the game to easy, play the hardest difficulty, it's not rocket science. Enemies are 50% tankier, attack faster, and their spell shields are trickier to break.