YMMV / Harry Potter: Wizards Unite

• Arc Fatigue: For the majority of the game's lifespan, the main storyline moved at a glacial pace. Brilliant Events, which were intended to move the story along, tended to be resolved in a cliché and almost predictable fashion nearly every time: Harry and the rest of the crew would discover a lead to Grim's whereabouts and how they could stop the Calamity, but it would inevitably turn out to be a false lead or simply more cryptic clues from the villains. This was likely done due to the game's premise, since if Harry and the characters could put a stop to the Calamity, there would be no more reason to play.
  • By the time 2021 rolled around, the story had begun to move again, but the player base had dropped off quite a bit since the game's debut and many of the game's remaining players either simply skipped or didn't care about the story's events anymore. In November 2021, the game's end of service was announced and the storyline was quickly concluded.
• Broken Base: The addition of the SOS skill trees ultimately broke the fandom. It involved the addition of even more resources to improve the player character's abilities, such as Spell Mastery. Higher level players in particular were frustrated as previously spell mastery—which increased the player's ability to overpower Confoundables—went up in small increments at every 5th level, but was now tied to the SOS tree. This meant that high level players were essentially starting from square one again. Quite a few players quit in frustration after the Trace Charm was nerfed.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Despite having more Anti-Frustration Features than Pokémon GO, the game still has a few:
  • Hitbox Dissonance is quite common - sometimes both in your favour and against your favour. You can trace a spell almost perfectly, but it will show a radically different symbol than what you actually traced.
  • Energy is awarded to the player via RNG at inns (and greenhouses). Which can be quite annoying when you visit an inn and get something like pumpkin juice or candy, which gives about three energy, when you need more as there is no way to guarantee you'll get the chicken dinner. (Which is also rather rare). In all fairness, there is a way to get 10 spell energy per day through a very easy method, except:
  • Some of the daily quests don't count things done until you see them in the Daily assignment tab. For example, picking up a portmanteau or ingredient will give you ten spell energy. Guaranteed. Well, knowing this, you might end up instinctively picking up several ingredients or portmanteaus only to find that they somehow did not count.
  • The item cap - much like most other mobile games, it exists solely to make you use gold.
  • The game is quite crashy and laggy, thanks to the servers being stressed.
  • The amount of different ingredients - as well as the variety. No way to guarantee you'll find some ingredients when you need them. You can buy them for gold, which is fortunately cheap (and possible to get with only the amounts you get on a daily basis)
  • Foundables still have a pretty high chance of departing instantly after a single spell cast, particularly the rarer ones. It doesn't matter if you've traced the spell perfectly or used your best potions, some are very finicky and won't even give the player a second chance.
  • Some quests require the player to hunt down specific monsters in Fortress battles. The good thing is that the types of enemies you have an advantage over will spawn more frequently based on your profession, but this can be frustrating when the quest requires you to defeat enemies that you are weak against and you've already invested quite a lot of scrolls and books to level up. However, enemies that spawn from Fortress battles are still completely random and it can be a huge timesink and drain on the player's Runestones and spell energy. The SOS task to defeat 10 Formidable Pixies might be the most notorious one.
  • The original daily tasks included visiting 2 Inns and beating a Fortress battle, both of which required physically traveling to these locations. This made accomplishing these tasks difficult to impossible for players whose work schedules, transport situation, or physical disabilities prevented this sort of daily travel (especially for those who were far from these locations). The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the removal of the Inn task altogether and the implementation of the Knight Bus to allow immediate Fortress play, with only a 0.25 kilometer walk necessary to complete the daily tasks.
  • Adventure Sync (a feature already existent in Pokemon GO, allowing the game to sync with outside health apps to track steps taken when Wizards Unite is closed) didn't get patched in until February 5, 2020, over 7 months after release. This meant that steps taken for things like unlocking Portkey Portmanteaus didn't count unless the game was open and running, which is a big battery drain. Many event tasks involved unlocking Portmanteaus at this time, resulting in frustration as players walked for miles only to find that a fraction of a kilometer was actually counted because they needed to lock their phone.
  • It's possible for enemies in battles to dodge attacks and take no damage from them, and it's possible for enemies and the player to get a chance to strike multiple times in a row. These mechanics are intentionally opaque and nobody has determined yet what allows for these multiple strikes to happen, which can result in a battle against an especially powerful enemy (like the Ancient Norwegian Ridgeback) to be unwinnable because it's simply allowed to hit you so many times that it drains all of your stamina in one go. In the case of dodging, you still lose a potion charge if the attack is dodged, which can result in very dodge-happy enemies like Narcissa Malfoy forcing you to use way more potions than you should. With the appearance of Lethal Adversary chains, which are difficult and draining of potion stocks even for high level players, there have been concerns raised about how much playtesting was done due to instances of enemies getting as many as 8 attacks in a row.
  • The lack of any sort of Skill Point Reset ultimately hurt the game. Outside of group fortress battles, it was generally agreed upon by the playerbase that Auror was the best for tackling solo content, such as facing dragons and Adversaries as their high damage + high chance of landing critical hits meant defeating enemies faster and having to spend less spell energy. However, this meant that players who were already playing as Magizoologists and Professors were either less effective at battling enemies on their own or would ultimately end up having to grind more if they wanted to invest in being an Auror, as well. This could put a strain on the player's already limited Restricted Section and Defense Against the Dark Arts books, both of which are necessary for unlocking higher level SOS skills.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The Trace Charm was one of the most welcome additions to the game, increasing both fragments and the amount of Foundables that a player could see on the field. This was imperative due to the Collection Sidequest nature of the game and since incredibly rare Foundables could be hard to come by outside of Community Days and events. However, the developers realized that they made the Trace Charm too powerful and rolled back some of its effects, such as revealing traces of a higher rarity than the one it was cast on. Needless to say, the fanbase did not receive these changes well. A fully upgraded Trace Charm is still pretty powerful, but required the investment in a lot of limited resources.
• Ugly Cute: The baby troll foundable. It has the same knobby legs, cone-shaped head, and dim-witted expression as all trolls we see in the franchise...but the fact that it's a baby, and its surprisingly sweet smile, make it absolutely adorable.