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Powerful yes, but not so much as HP wizards who are in theory just shockingly OP.
I've always been drawn in to the setting partly by the idea that modern HP wizards (save a handful, like Voldemort and Dumbledore) are as silly, lazy & unoptimal in their use of magic as they are portrayed due to winning so hard against everything else that they no longer need to put in much effort.
Dobby casually overpowered Lucius Malfoy, a powerful Death Eater. And once upon a time the Elves fought a war against the wizards and lost so badly that their enslaved descendents shudder in horror at the thought of being freed.
Yes, HP wizards are quite strong but in the same way real world humans are. HP wizards can kill someone with a word but we baseline humans have, as far as combat is concerned, strictly better weaponry. It's true that in HP the castle disables technology and perhaps that's the kind of thing wizards can bring with them everywhere but wizards in HP really are only roughly as dangerous to eachother as the rest of us can trivially be if we allow the carry of our equivalent of wands. I was always disappointed in the lack of exploration of how a wizarding world would interact with the muggle world but I know think it was for the best. The HP world really just can't be resolved with living among muggles, especially not where any wizard is so poor.
You are absurdlyunderestimating how OP Harry Potter style Wizard's are. Wizard's powers are not equivalent to that of a modern human with a gun.
In an actual war between all of the muggle world and a group 10 talented wizards, the wizards would win in a single day. Apply an invisibility charm, aparate to Washington, imperio the President, do the same to all ranking cabinet members. Repeat for each country. Be back home for lunch. You already won, but you can spend the next week Aparating around under invisibility charm and casting imperio on everyone that matters.
That is a single trivial application of what you could do. It doesn't matter if a gun is better than an Avada Kadavra, a wizard should win every fight against a muggle without using any lethal force.
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I'll admit that not all wizards have access to the full magical arsenal, but HP wizards have:
-transformation, including perfect impersonation
-healing, regeneration & poison removal
-long-term mind control (Imperius curse alone solos the muggle world) and truth-detection
-limited time travel and the 'I win button' of perfect good luck
-invisibility, personal flight and teleportation
-installation cloaking (Hogwarts is nuke-proof because you can't target it)
-a million situational spells, potions, items & useful creatures that any given wizard might have access to, and will quickly proliferate if they prove useful (as, say, a ward against bullets might)
Wizards do not see muggles as a threat in the same way as humans don't really see bears as a threat - a careless human can easily die to a bear attack but this essentially never happens, and if humans ever decided to eradicate bears it would be an entirely one-sided affair.
Wizards can be poor because they don't have anything other wizards want & are barred by wizarding law (with downright spooky surveillance abilities) from participating on the muggle economy. But they're never truly destitute as long as they'vegot a wand, as they can magic up the rough neccessities of life in extrema.
More than that, you just cast an invisibility charm, apparate next to world leaders, Imperio them, repeat for people at every locus of control, and wizards control the muggle world.
Yup. And then have three options:
-commit to a grinding worldwide counter-insurgency against weak but numerous, intelligent and highly motivated foes, with no end in sight
-make the changes you want & then rebuild your masquerade and vanish from muggle perception. Memory charms arent perfect at information control, but you can probably limit the leakage to rumors & legends that magic was real in some past era...
I feel like the untold history of the HP world was pretty metal.
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Any Transfiguration master who knows where to read up on chemistry can, as HPMoR demonstrates, cause death and mayhem far more efficiently than if he had an automatic gun, or even a rocket launcher.
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