Hey gamers, how are you all doing? Hope everyone is doing great! My adventure in Hogwarts Legacy continues and today we're keeping things relatively light compared to everything that's been going on with trials, vaults, and goblin loyalists. This time it's all about getting back on the broom and completing the first flying assignment that Madam Kogawa sent my way. She assigned it after the flying class we took together — the one where Everett Clopton dragged me into that unauthorized tour around the castle — and it's been sitting in my quest log ever since. The assignment itself is straightforward enough in concept: fly around two specific locations and pop balloons that are floating around in the area. Simple idea. In practice though it ends up being more of a patience exercise than anything else because the balloons don't all appear at the same time, which means you end up doing a lot of low-altitude circling and waiting for the next one to show up. Not the most intense quest in the game by any stretch, but honestly a welcome breather from everything else going on, and the reward at the end makes it completely worth your time.
Popping Balloons at the Hogsmeade Train Station
The first location Kogawa sends you to is the area around the Hogsmeade Station — the train station where you first arrived at the start of the game. It's a familiar spot, which makes navigation easy, and you can fast travel to the South Hogsmeade Floo Flame and then hop on the broom to reach the station area quickly without any trouble. Once you're there and airborne, the balloons start appearing around the station building and the surrounding tracks and platform structures. They show up in clusters of varying sizes, some floating close to the ground near the station roof and others sitting a bit higher up in the air around the outer edges of the area.
The actual mechanics of popping them couldn't be simpler — fly directly into them and they burst on contact. No spell required, no aiming necessary, just steer the broom into the balloon and it goes. The challenge, such as it is, comes from the fact that not all of them are visible at once when you first arrive. Some balloons only materialize after you've already popped a few others, so the loop becomes fly around, pop what you can see, circle back, find the new ones that appeared, pop those too, circle again. It takes a few passes before you've cleared everything in the area. The broom boost helps here — using the speed burst to cover the area quickly means you can complete each loop faster and spot new spawns sooner rather than just slowly drifting from one balloon to the next.
The station area itself looks great from the air during this section, which is a nice bonus. Flying low over the tracks and the platform structures gives you a perspective on this location that you never get on the ground, and the surrounding landscape of bridges, hills, and the distant village of Hogsmeade spread out below makes for a genuinely pleasant little flying stretch even if the task itself is on the repetitive side. Once the last balloon pops and the station area is clear, Kogawa's quest updates and sends you to the second location.
Popping Balloons at the Quidditch Pitch
The second location is the Quidditch Pitch, which sits out on the Hogwarts grounds beyond the main castle walls, and this is easily the more enjoyable of the two balloon sections purely because of where it takes place. The Quidditch Pitch is one of those locations in Hogwarts Legacy that genuinely captures the magic of the wizarding world in a specific way — the towering wooden stands rising up around the oval pitch, the goal hoops at either end, the whole scale of the thing when you're flying above it. It's a shame you can't actually play Quidditch in this game but at least you get to fly around the pitch freely and appreciate the design of it, and this assignment is one of the better excuses the game gives you to spend some real time out there.
The balloons here are spread across the full vertical range of the pitch — some hovering close to the ground inside the arena itself, others positioned level with the tops of the stands, and a few floating even higher above the goal hoops at either end. The vertical spread means you're doing more altitude changes during this section than you were at the train station, which actually makes it feel more like real flying rather than just horizontal loops. Pulling up to grab a high balloon above a goal hoop and then diving back down toward the pitch floor to hit a low one has a genuinely satisfying rhythm to it once you get into the flow. The broom's responsiveness in vertical movement really shines here — climbing and diving feel smooth and natural, and the boost comes in handy for covering the longer horizontal distances between opposite ends of the pitch quickly.
Same deal as the train station though — not all the balloons show up immediately and you'll need to make multiple circuits before they're all popped and accounted for. Just keep circling, keep using Revelio periodically to highlight any you might be missing on the edges of the area, and eventually the quest will register that the last one is down and you're done. The full balloon-popping sequence across both locations is honestly more about enjoying the flying than about any kind of real challenge, which is fine. Not every quest needs to be a brutal combat gauntlet.
Madam Kogawa Teaches Me Glacius
With all the balloons popped across both locations, it's back to Madam Kogawa to report completion and collect the reward. And here's where the assignment stops feeling like optional busy work and starts feeling very worthwhile — Kogawa sits you down and teaches you Glacius, the Freezing Charm. This is a genuinely excellent spell and a significant addition to your combat toolkit.
What Glacius does is freeze enemies solid on contact — the target gets encased in a layer of magical ice that temporarily stops them in their tracks, makes them unable to attack or move, and most importantly makes them significantly more vulnerable to follow-up damage. The critical thing to understand about Glacius is the combo potential it unlocks. Freeze an enemy with Glacius, then immediately hit them with a spell like Expelliarmus or a basic cast barrage and the frozen state shatters, dealing bonus damage and sending ice shards flying in all directions that can hit nearby enemies for additional damage. It's essentially a built-in crowd control tool that also creates area damage opportunities, which makes it incredibly useful in fights where multiple enemies are clustered together.
It also has some creative environmental uses beyond straightforward combat. It can freeze certain water-based puzzles and interact with fire-based hazards in interesting ways, and it pairs nicely with Accio — freeze an enemy, pull them toward you while they're immobilized, then immediately follow up with a high-damage spell while they can't dodge. The minigame for learning the spell has a moderately complex wand movement pattern but nothing that should give you serious trouble if you've been keeping up with spell learning throughout the game. Once it's locked in, Glacius earns its place in your active spell rotation almost immediately.
Kogawa also rewards you with 180 XP for completing the assignment, which goes straight toward the level grind for taking another run at Percival Rackham's trial. Every bit counts at this point. She has a second assignment further down the line that will unlock another new spell when completed, so that's definitely going on the to-do list as well. For now though, Glacius is in the toolkit, the broom got a proper workout, and another side quest gets checked off. Progress is progress gamers. See you in the next post!
