The main character in Hogwarts Legacy is clearly leagues above all of their classmates in terms of magical ability, and this fact can be attributed to their talent for using Ancient Magic to enhance their spell casting. Ancient Magic also serves as the primary driving factor behind the story of the game, and players will use it frequently in order to defeat giant spiders, Inferi, and the numerous Dark Wizards that they encounter along the way. At first, players only have two bars of Ancient Magic meter to work with, but there's actually a way to increase this amount and use Ancient Magic finishers much more often.
Ancient Magic allows the player to throw objects at enemies, spend talent points to upgrade their spells and abilities beyond what they would normally be able to do, and, most importantly, perform powerful finishing attacks like dropping lightning from the sky on enemies, transfiguring them into helpless animals, or straight up blowing them to smithereens. The latter effect requires the use of Hogwarts Legacy's Ancient Magic Meter.
How to Increase the Ancient Magic Meter in Hogwarts Legacy
Two bars of Ancient Magic meter can carry the player a long way, but they'll no doubt be wanting more once they realize just how powerful Ancient Magic finishers are. In order to increase the Ancient Magic meter, players need to complete the Field Guide challenges for Ancient Magic Hotspots.
Each challenge completed will add another bar to the player's total, ultimately resulting in the player having five full bars of Ancient Magic Meter, each of which can be used to cast an Ancient Magic finisher. In order to complete the challenges, players need to collect all traces from two, six, and 12 Ancient Magic Hotspots, for a total of 20 hotspots.
How to Complete Ancient Magic Hotspots in Hogwarts Legacy
Ancient Magic Hotspots can easily be found on the map by looking for the Ancient Magic symbol. By heading to these locations, players will find a spot they can interact with similar to the ones in Gringotts Bank or the Keeper trials. From here, wisps of light will lead the player to three separate traces of Ancient Magic that they can collect simply by walking or flying over them. Collect all three and the player will have completed one Ancient Magic Hotspot.
Finding all 20 Ancient Magic Hotspots will be a challenge, especially since many of them are guarded by Ashwinder enemies or found in end-game locations like Poidsear Coast. That said, it's a fairly easy task to complete the first eight once the player has their broom. Doing this early on can really help the player when faced with difficult bosses or challenging enemy encounters.
Hogwarts Legacy is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X; the Switch version is set to release on July 25th.