August 2019 Community Day Guide

The second Wizards Unite Community Day is coming up soon! Ready your wands, and read on for details about the event as well as tips on how to prepare and make the most of it.

For those who don’t know, Community Day is a 3-hour event, typically occurring once a month on a Saturday or Sunday. August Community Day is scheduled for Saturday, August 10th. There are three separate times for the event, depending on region, which are:

Asia Pacific: 1:00 P.M. to 4:00 P.M. AEST (UTC +10)

Europe, Middle East, Africa, and India: 10:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M. UTC

The Americas and Greenland: 11:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M. PDT (UTC -7)

During those three hours, players benefit from a handful of in-game bonuses. For August, the bonuses are:

• XP bonuses (confirmed to be both Wizarding XP and Challenges XP) when participating in Wizarding Challenges, with additional bonuses for playing with friends (bonuses included for solo play as well)
• Players will receive at least 2x Wizarding XP while doing Fortress battles with friends
• Players will receive at least 2x Challenge XP when doing Fortresses with others (no need to be friends for the bonus), which more Challenge XP for larger groups.
• Healing potions restore 50% Stamina when consumed
• Healing potions brew 50% faster than usual
• Master Notes for Healing Potion will reduce brew time by 50%
• Ingredients used to brew Healing potions (Wormwood, Bubotuber Pus, Dittany, and Dragon Liver) appear more frequently on the Map
• Potions brewed using a Rental Cauldron will have their brew times reduced by 33%

Players will also be able to claim a Free Store Pack during the Community Day hours. This month, the pack features:

• 50 Spell Energy
• 3 Runestones:
  • 1 Level 1 Hogwarts School
  • 1 Level 2 Hogwarts School
  • 1 Level 3 Hogwarts School
• 3 Silver Keys

The developers note:

We’ve included 3 Silver Keys as a thank you for your patience and feedback dealing with Portmanteau issues during Week 2 of Potter’s Calamity Brilliant Event.

Note: the above was updated Friday, August 9th after more details were released from the developers.

This Community Day’s bonuses offer a significant shift in focus from last month’s bonuses. Rather than bonuses for Trace encounters, this month encourages players to team up to take on tough Fortress Challenges together. 

Finding a community

It’s not called Community Day for nothing! This is a great chance to try to find local players in your area or take a day trip somewhere else to meet new players and connect with the Wizards Unite community.

While the community is still new, many local groups have already started to form. The easiest way to look for a community near you is to simply search “wizards unite [your location]” into Google, Facebook, or other social media sites. You can also try searching for Pokémon GO communities, as many of them have started Wizards Unite groups. A few sites have also started maps of communities, which might help you find a group near you, such as Wizard Unite World’s Discord map, and Wizards GO App’s local community database.

Where to Play

For this Community Day, finding a good location is absolutely essential. Almost all of the bonuses require access to a Fortress, and players will likely want to find one that will be comfortable and safe to stay at for 3 hours. 

Ideally, players will want to find a popular Fortress (watch for the green glow, meaning that other players are battling there) with somewhere to sit in range of both the Fortress and hopefully some Inns. It can also be helpful to pick a Fortress with a good cluster of Inns nearby for quick energy replenishing.

Popular places for Community Days include parks, downtown areas, sponsored malls, museums, and more. If you’re not sure where to go, just try going to one of those places and look for any glowing Fortresses to find other players.

Be sure to check your local weather forecast as well. If the weather is unpleasant—too hot, too rainy, too humid—you might want to look for somewhere indoors to keep you and your phone safe from the elements.

Unlock chambers

Players who haven’t done any Fortress battles before should consider going to a Fortress and trying out some of the early levels before Community Day. Each level you complete permanently unlocks another level at all Fortresses you visit, but you cannot access later chambers without first beating earlier ones.

Of course, it’s also fine to show up on Community Day having never done a Fortress at all! Don’t worry if you don’t know what you’re doing (though be sure to check out the Fortress Combat Guide for help if you want to prepare). Most players will be happy to help show you the ropes.

Spell Energy

Since Fortress battles generally require staying in one place, players will have a harder time replenishing energy throughout the event. While the free store pack will help, players will want to be sure to max out their energy just before Community Day starts. That way they can maximise the number of Fortress battles they can do without needing to leave the Fortress to go collect more energy again.

Collect Runestones

Runestones are like single-use tickets to Fortresses, so if you plan on playing during this Community Day, you’ll definitely want to have some on hand. If you want to avoid spending any gold, use the next few days to focus on ranking up your registry with Trace encounters and portkeys to get a few more free Runestones.

Of course, while saving up Runestones, don’t skip the daily Fortress battle rewards! A single pack of Runestones can get you 10 days of daily rewards, or 100 coins, so as long as you’re only doing one or two battles a day, buying Runestones actually earns you gold.

Premium items

Gold burning a hole in your pocket? For this Community Day, our main recommendation is to use that gold on premium brewing (see below) and Runestones, if you need them. Players can probably expect to use about 30-40 runestones, depending on which chambers they battle and how much time is spent restocking energy. 

If there isn’t a good set of inns nearby though, it may be worth just buying Spell Energy to be able to keep on battling without much disruption. 

Players might also consider buying some storage increases in advance to help stock up on potions and spell energy.

Other things to bring

Depending on where you’re playing and what the weather is like, you might also want to bring water, snacks, sunscreen, or an umbrella. If you want to play the full three hours, a charged up battery pack (and charging cable for your phone) is also a must.

With Fortress battles the focus of this Community Day, players will want to bring an array of potions to help out. Exstimulo, Healing, Invigoration, and Wit-Sharpening potions will all come in handy, but how many should you stock up of each? That will depend a lot on your playstyle and who you’ll be playing with.

Exstimulo Potions

These potions are useful for everyone. Stock up on the strongest ones you have and consider keeping some ingredients on hand for basic exstimulos, since these will only cost 7 coins at most to complete when using the rental cauldron on Community Day. Budget about 25% vault capacity for these.

Healing Potions

While healing potions will likely be the single most useful potion this Community Day, players should only need to stock up a little bit of healing potions (15-20% of vault capacity), thanks to the increased healing ingredient spawns and reduced brewing speed during Community Day. Players who don’t want to spend any gold, however, may want to stock up a bit more.

Wit-Sharpening Potions

These potions become more useful the further into chambers you go. If your group will be sticking to Ruins and early Tower chambers, feel free to skip these or only bring a couple in case of a rare Elite encounter. However, if your group will be doing Forest or even Dark Forest, and especially if you might be carrying others who aren’t as deep into their skill trees, you’ll want to bring along plenty of these. Budget at least 10 if you can.

Invigoration Draughts

As with Wit-Sharpening, the usefulness of these will depend a lot on your playstyle, and the deeper into the chambers you go, the more you’ll want to have full access to all of your strategic spells. Bring 

Baruffio’s Brain Elixir

For those keen on levelling up, doing lots of fortress battles in groups is a great opportunity to grind Wizarding XP. Bring up to 6 Baruffio’s Brain Elixirs to be able to keep them running throughout the entire event. 

With all of the bonuses related to brewing, Community Day will be a great chance to brew lots of potions. For only 15 coins, players can rent the gold cauldron for the entirety of Community Day and take full advantage of the brewing speed boost. Be sure to check out our recent Premium Brewing Guides for more on basic ingredient and potion costs (Part One) and the gold cauldron (Part Two). 

Below, you’ll find a chart of all of the brew times (with Master Notes), cost to complete, and overall cost of the potion assuming no ingredients, with the previous cheapest price for comparison (brewed with a standard cauldron or purchased from Diagon Alley).

Note: it is possible to interpret the 33% brew speed increase as in addition to the base 10% for gold cauldrons, but we’ll stick with the more conservative option for now for our calculations.

Healing potions will actually brew faster than above, but it is not yet known just how much their brew time will be reduced. If the increased ingredient spawns are enough to keep up with brewing, that effectively means healing potions will, at most, only cost 7 gold each for those who rent a cauldron. 

Update Aug 9th: Healing potions will brew 50% faster, and Master Notes will reduce this time by another 50%. In other words, the standard cauldron will take 30 minutes (3 gold), and the gold Cauldron will take 20 minutes (2 minutes).

To summarise, here’s a list of everything to bring on Community Day:

In-game:

• A full inventory of Potions for battling (Exstimulo, Healing, Invigoration, and Wit-Sharpening)
• Up to 6 Baruffio’s Brain Elixir
• As much Spell Energy as you can hold
• Around 30-40 runestones 
• At least 15 gold to buy the cauldron rental, plus more gold to complete more potions during the 3 hours

Other:

• Water
• Snacks
• Sunscreen
• Umbrella
• Battery pack
• Phone charging cable

Be sure to double check that you have everything you need before heading out for this month’s Wizards Unite Community Day!