Four seconds to say three syllabi sounds very slow. How slow do you talk? Taking just some random look at random people talking gets me more like 5 syllabi per second or even more.
Anyway, the advantage of the wizards does never lie in direct combat. Things like apparition, shapeshifting, invisibility, mind reading, unplottable spaces, imperio and so on are what would make them a nightmare for muggles to fight. It dosent help if your army can win in the field if all your leaders are mind controlled, replaced or killed by invisible teleporting assassins.
Four seconds to say three syllabi sounds very slow. How slow do you talk? Taking just some random look at random people talking gets me more like 5 syllabi per second or even more.
Anyway, the advantage of the wizards does never lie in direct combat. Things like apparition, shapeshifting, invisibility, mind reading, unplottable spaces, imperio and so on are what would make them a nightmare for muggles to fight. It dosent help if your army can win in the field if all your leaders are mind controlled, replaced or killed by invisible teleporting assassins.
Most of that stuff wouldn't defeat machines because it wasn't designed to.
Like, invisibility doesn't even need motion sensors to beat it, just an Infrared Camera, which have been a thing since the 70s.
You can't just Imperio the president or something either there are systems and failsafe in place to ensure one guy can't just launch all the nukes for instance.
Most of that stuff wouldn't defeat machines because it wasn't designed to.
Like, invisibility doesn't even need motion sensors to beat it, just an Infrared Camera, which have been a thing since the 70s.
You can't just Imperio the president or something either there are systems and failsafe in place to ensure one guy can't just launch all the nukes for instance.
You seem to be under the impression that just because it can be theoretically countered its useless. Sure, imperioing the president wont destroy the world. It will still make things very bad for you even if you eventually catch it.
If the wizards are smart (admittedly a big if) dealing with them is nigh impossible, since they have unreachable and un-rememberable spaces to hide in, can teleport, and dont need to hang around. What are you going to do, have infrared cameras in every room of every important building that automatically machine-gun every blip? A wizard just needs to pop in, say a few words, and pop out again a few seconds later, and major damage is done.
Im not saying theyre invincible, but its an absolutely horrendous thing to face.
Zagreus himself notes that Dhar on Earth is less corrupting than on Mallus. And thats coming from him whos extremely Dhar averse and has WH typical paranoia about how corrupting something could be.
I don't believe he actually has any factual evidence. He has simply made the assumption based on the fact that wizards here seem to be able to utilize some amount of dhar without going insane.
I don't believe he actually has any factual evidence. He has simply made the assumption based on the fact that wizards here seem to be able to utilize some amount of dhar without going insane.
He's not running with a full Magister's Windsight and internalized sense of thaumanemology (sevirodynamics?), but he does know how Dhar curdles. He was very surprised when Pansy Parkinson ambushed him and promptly failed to hex him because she wasn't able to curdle her Dhar successfully. That somewhat implies that the ersatz-Winds have some different coefficient of coagulation (hatred constant??) than on Mallus.
Radiation Sickness isn't a disease. Not in the conventional sense. It's more like a poison. Given that we know poisons work against wizards, I would think this also works.
As to the shield charm, how would a wizard know to put that up when the average range of a modern military engagement is beyond visual range? Snipers, Artillery, Aircraft, and even tanks all engage from beyond visual range these days, let alone something like a drone strike, which isn't too far away, given the introduction of predator drones by the US military started in 95'.
The wizards would just be standing around, minding their own business when a sniper takes a shot at them from a mile away and suddenly their brains are all over the ground.
This is without taking into account that the average rate of speech for a three-syllable word like protego is 4 seconds. That doesn't count the wand movement. In 4 seconds, a trained rifleman with an M4 carbine can put 11 rounds down range. Trained in this case meaning has gone through Army basic training.
In short, the Wizards need to avoid a straight fight to have a chance. Even then, as technology marches on, they start losing their advantage in ambush scenarios as well.
This is not the thread for tired wizard vs muggle talking points from the early 2000s - I've seen this debate a million times, it never goes anywhere because people work with entirely different axioms.
Let's keep the stanning for the products of the modern military industrial complex against wizards to NonCredibleDefense, or better yet, its own thread, and keep this one for the story.
I like to think of it as the dementors suppressing positive thoughts, which basically swiftly drives their victims insane by simply having no ability to dwell on more than their failings.
But for Sirius, the knowledge of his innocence and self identity was a distinctly negative idea. Its all guilt, loss and misery. So its untouched.
If nukes get involved that's probably the end of it for everyone involved, wizard or human. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were little more than firecrackers compared to modern ICBMs, in terms of how far their effects spread; using NukeMap, dropping a nuclear weapon on a hypothetical wizard stronghold in Scotland would lead to a sizable swathe of the rest of Scotland being blanketed with enough radiation to kill a majority of the population and cause mass sickness and crippling disability among the survivors. Wizards have woven themselves into human population centers too tightly for nuclear weapons to serve as anything but a Pyrrhic final salvo, at best.
What's the point of making mass destruction weapons, if they can't be used because they are too powerful and cause too much damage on the environment? Besides, the notion of nuclear weapons itself is ridiculous. In a war, the main goal is, apart from defeating your enemies, also being able to get benefits from the resources that are left behind (land, minerals, space for repopulating etc). The radiation caused by a nuclear weapon prevents all that, as both the place where the bomb was dropped and the surroundings are poisoned, so that everything of value becomes useless. And that's without mentioning that the radiation can spread to another places due to weather patterns, like wind, rain, etc, so the ones who dropped it aren't safe from its hazards.
Speaking in terms of direct clashes between human militias and wizard death squads, the wizards would likely have the advantage there as well; the Shield Charm has been considered a ward of first resort among wizards since well before the Statute of Secrecy was established - which occurred significantly after the advent of firearms. I'll do the favor of presuming that Protego can only withstand a certain amount of gunfire before it's overwhelmed, but that still means that any wizard who wants it can just put on a pair of clothes with the Shield Charm worked into it ahead of time before they head off to the frontline, and they'll have protection that's at least on par with modern body armor for the cost of a few hours' work. (The cleverer ones would then accessorize with an overcoat that has its own Shield Charm, providing them two layers of protection.)
Depictions of what "militarized wizards" can do offensively are... chilling, to be frank. Imagine a squad of soldiers where all of them have a grenade launcher which never runs out of ammunition, and some of them can also do anything from deploying chemical weapons to making random nearby architecture suddenly animate and hostile.
Any wizard with skill at Transfiguration would be an absolute nightmare to deal with. The main limitations of their craft are the skill required for complex effects, the difficulty scaling somewhat in proportion to the size of the thing affected, and the fact that things conjured ex nihilo eventually return ad nihilo. The first is all but a nonissue for military purposes - who cares if the rivets holding the radio tower's support pillars together turn into weird, metallic-tasting toffee with slivers of metal in it rather than uniform blocks of food-grade sweets? The second rules out some of the more strategic-scale possibilities (imagine if a wizard Transfigured a cloud passing over a military column into an equivalent mass of lead, for example), but most buildings, electronic devices, and machinery would still be horribly vulnerable to having manageable chunks of their structure Transfigured. The third could arguably be an asset for the nastier kinds of combat Transfiguration; imagine being able to deploy chemical and radiological weapons with the knowledge that they'll stop existing within a few minutes of deployment, taking all risk of collateral damage with them.
Leaving aside the differences of innate power that make wizards and muggles stand apart from each other, along with their differing battle tactics influenced by the kind of resources at their disposal, I must say myself that muggles probably have the upper hand. I have no doubt that wizards are much more versatile than muggles when it comes to the magic that is available to them, allowing them much more imaginative options available to them, because magic can overwrite the laws of reality at a point that muggle technology is unable to (yet, just wait to when we are able to develop tonal architecture), and that magic can cause a lot of damage to muggle infraestructure. However, as @KnightofTempest have said, muggle weapons can be very effective against wizards if they are used wisely, as he stared in the comments.
As to the shield charm, how would a wizard know to put that up when the average range of a modern military engagement is beyond visual range? Snipers, Artillery, Aircraft, and even tanks all engage from beyond visual range these days, let alone something like a drone strike, which isn't too far away, given the introduction of predator drones by the US military started in 95'.
The wizards would just be standing around, minding their own business when a sniper takes a shot at them from a mile away and suddenly their brains are all over the ground.
This is without taking into account that the average rate of speech for a three-syllable word like protego is 4 seconds. That doesn't count the wand movement. In 4 seconds, a trained rifleman with an M4 carbine can put 11 rounds down range. Trained in this case meaning has gone through Army basic training.
In short, the Wizards need to avoid a straight fight to have a chance. Even then, as technology marches on, they start losing their advantage in ambush scenarios as well.
However, I'm not going to focus on wether muggle technology or wizard magic is more effective for practical purposes in warfare, as in my opinion, both are the same degree of deadly in different ways. No, the fact is that wizards are doomed to lose a war with muggles for three reasons: their numbers, their lifestyle and their mentality.
First, wizards are simply too few. In all wizarding Britain and Ireland , all the wizarding population could fill a large town or a small city. That's simply not enough to form a proper standing army.
Second, wizards are, by the most part, very used to an easy and comfortable lifestyle. Once their basic needs are satisfied, very few of them invest their time in honing their skills at magic and putting enough imagination to use them creatively in a fight. People like McGonagall, Flitwick and Dumbledore, who are masters of their craft, which are transfiguration and charms, and are able to do very clever and exceptional things with their magic, are the exception to the norm. They have dedicated their whole lives to become the best at what they do, as well as being imaginative enough to create new spells or use them in a way that nobody expect it. That kind of proficiency and mental flexibility won't be displayed by the common wizard or witch. Besides, to be truly skilled at magic, one must both practice as well as focus on what they are doing, so it isn't a matter or just waving a wand and saying a couple of words. The key of using magic is tapping into the inner power that a wizard has, willing strongly the desired effect, and the intensity of emotions that fuel it, that last one is basically what causes accidental magic, so it isn't a matter of just wanting something to happen. Magic is actually difficult, and the quickness which with those duelists manage to cast spells and counterspells in a fight, like the battle between Dumbledore and Voldemort at the ministry of magic, is deceptive , as they have spent so much time practicing that all those three steps come naturally to them, they are basically the equivalent of an archer who can hit the center of the bullseye multiple times in a fast succession of arrows. Not everyone can accomplish that. So the possibility of having a large number of wizards capable of doing what you say (making random nearby architecture suddenly animate and hostile, transfigurimg a cloud passing over a military column into an equivalent mass of lead) are pretty low, specially because most wizards don't do well when it comes to transfigure big things, teaching to transfigure small and simple thing, the simpler the thing, the easier the transfiguration.
I honestly don't know how molly Weasley, who by all intents and purposes is your average witch, had spent the last decade as a housewife, focusing on cooking charms and the like, managed to defeat Bellatrix Lestrange in a duel. It's possible that Molly had also fought in the first war, but considering the amount of time that passed between the first and the second,one would think that she would have been a little rusty.
Third, wizarding culture promotes, as a general rule, individualism in fights. Very few times we have seen organized attacks of a coordinated group of wizards working together in tandem. Traditionally, wizards solve conflicts through duels, and for what I've seen about duels, is usually a matter of who cast the first spell, and wether the spell is strong enough to disarm or kill the opponent in that exact moment. Besides, as I already said previously, wizards, for the most part, aren't exactly imaginative when it comes to using their magic. Most of their spells are designed with defensive purposes, like disarming and the ones that are offensive are usually for stunning purposes, rarely lethal, save a couple of exceptions. Although there are spells that if they are used cleverly, can be devastating, most wizards, for what I've read in the books (because I don't pay any attention to the movies, as spells are almost always beams of light that work as stunning blasters that throw you out, which is quite boring), prefer to memorize the spells and expect the one they cast to be the one that puts an end to the fight. It comes to my mind the duel between harry and draco, in which they were throwing spells at each other, none of them bothering to dodge them or throwing them back (admittedly, they were schoolers, so I shouldn't expect them to be master duelists). In contrast, Dumbledore and Voldemort were apart from casting an unusual array of spells, they were trying to overpower each other by casting them in very unconventional ways, waiting for the other to open a breach in their defenses, like, Dumbledore envelopes Voldemort in a rope of fire, and Voldemort turns that very same rope into a snake that he throws at Dumbledore. Seriously, how hardcore is that?
And finally, for what I've seen of wizards, they method of warfare is drastically different from what muggles are used to. Because of their few numbers, as I said before, and their individualism way to solve things in single fights, wizards don't have a proper army. Their use of wands make them favor ranged combat, like muggles with firearms yes, but their main fighting forces are comprised of aurors, which if I understood it correctly, are the equivalent of the police, and although I have no doubt that professional aurors can be a very effective S.W.A.T., the way forces like the police fight are very different from the way professional soldiers of an army fight. For starters, unlike the police, army operations involve a wider scope than of the police, simply for the scale of the conflict.
In conclusion, although I think wizards would be able to inflict a great deal of damage to the muggles, in the end muggles would win.
And when it comes to death eaters, whatever they claim, and however many times they have been compared to the Nazis, they were actually closer to the kkk. Unlike the real Nazis, who had one of the best armies in the world, the kkk were only a group of thugs with hoods that terrified the defenseless black population of southern villages in places like Alabama. Just because a guy have a gun and uses it to shoot a couple of civilians it doesn't make him a soldier. And death eaters only targeted unaware muggle families that didn't see what was coming, like the one at the quidditch cup, so it was hardly a meaningful feat.
To be fair to the wizards, we don't exactly know how does invisibility magic work, maybe it would be able to trick the devices, maybe it's a matter of what the spell is designed to hide from.
Anyway, the advantage of the wizards does never lie in direct combat. Things like apparition, shapeshifting, invisibility, mind reading, unplottable spaces, imperio and so on are what would make them a nightmare for muggles to fight. It dosent help if your army can win in the field if all your leaders are mind controlled, replaced or killed by invisible teleporting assassins.
All this aside from the kind of logistical and strategic damage wizards could wreak. The Obliviators are already a totalitarian secret police who operate extensively within human territory and have a great deal of resources and infrastructure to draw on. Imagine the carnage they could cause just by dumping the right sort of potion into a city's water supply, or dropping off one of the countless examples of deadly magical flora and fauna behind enemy lines?
The thing I've noticed about obliviators, and wizarding culture in general,is that they are so damn effective because people in general refuse to believe about the existence of magic, and because muggle society seems unaware about the existence of a hidden civilization of magical people. Besides, I think that memory charms work so well in muggles is because muggles aren't trained to resist that kind of magic. For what I've read in other fantasy books, things like mind wiping magic or turning someone into an animal can be counterfeited with a very strong personality and sturdy mental defenses, as the kind of spells that turn someone into a ferret work by forcing the person to believe they are a ferret.
However, I don't know if a muggle would be able to resist a mind wiping charm, is it a matter of wether you have magic or not, or just of mental fortitude? After all, the best way to deal with the imperius curse is basically that.
In case it's the latter, I suspect that if wizards tried to pull a stunt like that on warhammerverse, it wouldn't work nearly as well as it does here, mainly because people are much more cautious of magic, and witch hunters, who are specifically trained to shoot down wizards, would be very able to shrugg off attempts of erasing their memories.
In fact, I would like to see a squad of aurors trying to take down an experienced witch hunter like Alberich von korden, who has a long track record of three vampire kills and a vargheist, apart from blasting to pieces a witch named the grey hag in gorstanford with a cannon nicknamed hammer of the witches, after they failed to burn her at the stake, which reminds me of wendelin the weird, who passed the time by allowing herself to be caught by muggles and be burned at the stake, with no results, as she cast a freezing charm on the flames, making them ticklish (my headcanon is that she never really existed, and that she was in fact a fictional character fabricated by wizards in laterctimes to make muggles harmless and goofy, and thus unworthy of fear, because anyone with a minimum of knowledge about how witch huntings really were, would realize that no person, wizard or muggle, would survive the horrific tortures that they would have to gone through, apart from the fact that they would have had their wand taken away, and therefore unable to do magic).
A standard disillusionment charm cast weakly, is used to hide hippogriffn owned by wizards, living in muggle towns, and villages including their flights. Any wizard can trivially become impossible to see to muggles.
Findeyfire is magical flames that burn both regular, and enchanted water. Apart form a wizard with the counter charm it cannot be stopped, certainly not by muggles. Any wizard can teleport into a city, military base, factory, cast the spell and teleport away, don't even need to control the spell just cast it and let if rampage until it burned everything to ash.
Wizards have covered up time breaking, their ablity to hide is so good that entire forests, mountain ranges, and islands are completely unknown to all records even satellites. Their ablity to hide is so good that the math for how much gravity the earth has both includes, and excludes the fact the world is bigger then muggles are aware of.
People make their circulations on how much rocket fuel they need to get into space, using the wrong numbers, and yet somehow wind up using the correct amount of rocket fuel to actually get into space. Your talking millions of people who sole job is to double check math, and they cannot even notice that the math is wrong.
Any war ends with muggles knocked back to the stone age, while wizards keep debating cauldron bottom measurements.
I'm not sure I'd go that far. She was throwing around Mindhole pretty liberally last time we saw her, and she's been fighting her shadow-war with the Obilviators enough that she's almost certainly figured out how to get the most out of her magic.
Maybe she doesn't have access to quite as much power, not being at Hogwarts, but she's probably a lot better at getting results out of what she does have. She is a Magister, after all.
I'm not sure I'd go that far. She was throwing around Mindhole pretty liberally last time we saw her, and she's been fighting her shadow-war with the Obilviators enough that she's almost certainly figured out how to get the most out of her magic.
Maybe she doesn't have access to quite as much power, not being at Hogwarts, but she's probably a lot better at getting results out of what she does have. She is a Magister, after all.
Bewilder and Mindhole are both spells in the same general area as Reaping Scythe, and Nyx can manage that decently enough. Nyx certainly would have a better understanding of how magic here works. He has access to local academia.
It depends on how paranoid Magister Grey is and what information she gets.
We last saw her going to speak with Snape at the funeral. She has been looking into Zagreus, most likely because the Death Eaters, so she might learn that he is an Imperial. It'll likely be by context clues like the worship of Morr and having strangely purple magic. That would lead to her preparing to go to Hogwarts for a more in depth investigation.
Depending on when Magister Grey gets the message in the newspaper changes how long she will prepare. It is one thing to know that there might be an apprentice at Hogwarts, it is another to know someone is giving its Headmaster information about the Empire. With how terrible some of the wizards are, Grey might suspect that Zagreus is having information extracted from him. That would mean she needs to get there fast to rescue or silence him.
Snape has left the quidditch grounds during the quidditch match for some reason, maybe to speak with magister grey, who may be at this very moment at Hogwarts. That, or maybe he is making sure Quirrel isn't up to some mischief with the stone. When was the last time we saw Quirrel, by the way?
I like to think of it as the dementors suppressing positive thoughts, which basically swiftly drives their victims insane by simply having no ability to dwell on more than their failings.
But for Sirius, the knowledge of his innocence and self identity was a distinctly negative idea. Its all guilt, loss and misery. So its untouched.
I would be somewhat surprised if she managed to interrogate Snape. Snape is a pretty clever person and a decent wizard. I would also imagine that she wouldn't be able to mindhole him with anywhere near the efficacy as she's done so far. That could get violent.
A lot of it varies on how our Magister learned of Nyx.
I would be somewhat surprised if she managed to interrogate Snape. Snape is a pretty clever person and a decent wizard. I would also imagine that she wouldn't be able to mindhole him with anywhere near the efficacy as she's done so far. That could get violent.
A lot of it varies on how our Magister learned of Nyx.
It's more a matter of "when" more than of "if". What a grey wizard wants to know, they will get, no matter the time it takes nor the methods necessary.
I feel like that'd be a later year thing? We don't even know all that much about each magic system individually, let alone the specific differences between them.
The most I'd expect would be cribbing ideas where he can from one and using the theory to alter a spell from the other side.
I feel like that'd be a later year thing? We don't even know all that much about each magic system individually, let alone the specific differences between them.
The most I'd expect would be cribbing ideas where he can from one and using the theory to alter a spell from the other side.
I mean, I'd like to at least start working out how to fuel HP spells with Shyish and vice-versa, since it seems like there may be stuff we can't do with just Shyish.
A lot of your routine spellwork is an attempt to merge or reconcile the two systems, particularly in Transfiguration. (Most recently, when you voted to pull on the thread of ambient magic) So it's always going on as you continue your Hogwarts education.
If you really want to dig into a particular aspect of the problem, then certain actions (or write-ins, failing that) are always an option.
