Fellowship is a four-player cooperative dungeon crawler where players take on the roles of pre-designed heroes, each with unique abilities, weapons, and gear. The game emphasizes team-based strategy, skill execution, and progression-based content. Your party will be comprised of one tank, one healer, and two DPS. For those familiar with old-school MMORPGs, you can think of fellowship like streamlined semi rogue-lite raids, dungeon runs, and adventures without the rest of the elements of the RPG, such as exploration and a set story to complete. If you miss classical raiding but can't be bothered to grind through an MMORPG again, Fellowship may scratch that itch.
This game may specifically appeal to retired WoW players that quit the game because of the grind. The mode that more closely resembles Fellowship is Mythic +, since there is scaling difficulties to the dungeons, there's also the added requirement of killing a certain number of mobs before clearing it entirely, and there are also time challenges to complete for extra rewards. The aspect WoW veterans may be wary of is that Fellowship has pre-set characters, so it's not big on personalization. With that being said, you do not need to "level" a character, just progress through a reward tree to unlock the characters full potential.
Game Modes
Quickplay
Quickplay is a non-ranked mode where four players explore a short dungeon called an Adventure. These adventures tend to be short (you can finish one in roughly 10 minutes) and easy to complete. The main feature of this game mode is that it allows you to play with anyone in the game, regardless of their rank. It works wonders for players who want to practice with a new hero before taking on the Challenger Mode. Completing Adventures in this mode rewards all players with tokens to buy gear and Cache Keys to buy chests to upgrade your heroes.
Keep in mind, you will be heavily buffed in a Quickplay game. You will received 20% in all secondary stats, have a flat amount of primary stat regardless of your characters actual stats. This will give you a taste of what the character will feel like at max gear. Players might find it challenging to adjust from Quickplay to Contender as you will drop quite a bit in power when you enter a Contender dungeon.
Challenger Mode
This is the ranked mode for Fellowship. Here, you'll encounter Adventures, medium-sized dungeons that take roughly 10 minutes to complete, and their difficulty depends on your progress in the rank.
There are four ranks: Contender, Adept, Champion, and Paragon.
You start in Contender, and all adventures there scale from +1 to +6 in difficulty. Then, you'll unlock a +7 "capstone" Dungeon, which is longer and harder to complete. Completing this Dungeon and getting gear with a high rank allows you to enter Adept, and it works like this all the way to Paragon.
Completing Adventures here rewards you with gear that allows you to explore higher-difficulty Adventures and Dungeons. As you progress, the Dungeons will increase their difficulty by providing the bosses with new abilities and applying debuffs to the heroes. To learn more about Dungeons, please check the Dungeons page.
The Capstone dungeons of each Rank begin to appear in match making once your character reaches a certain item level. If you are in a party of 4 people total, you can choose to enter the Capstone Dungeon at any item level as long as you've unlocked the Rank
Item levels needed to queue into a Capstone Dungeon:
Contender: 60
Adept: 120
Champion: 180
Paragon: 240
Eternal Mode
Once you've completed the Capstone dungeon for Paragon, you will unlock Eternal mode. In Eternal mode, there is no matchmaking system at the moment. You will need to be in a party of 4 players to enter any and all Eternal mode adventures and dungeons.
Eternal mode introduces an infinite dungeon scaling system. You will progress with your group through harder and harder versions of the adventures and dungeons you've been doing but this time with no cap. While the dungeon difficulty scales infinitely, your character will not progress past 330 item level. The further you go into Eternal, the higher the chance for socketed items, socket power, and legendaries as rewards from the chest once you complete the dungeon.
Hero Archetypes
Fellowship is a hero-based co-op game, and as such, it will have pre-set heroes across 3 basic classes: Tanks, DPS, and Healers. The heroes fall into certain well-known archetypes or combinations of archetypes from your classical MMORPGs. Below you can find what each of the heroes play as, in terms of gameplay when compared to other, classical MMORPG classes:
- Helena - Warrior / Paladin
- Meiko - Monk / Death knight
- Rime - Frost Mage
- Mara - Rogue / Havoc Demon
- Ardeos - Fire Mage / Warlock
- Tariq - Warrior
- Sylvie - Restoration Druid / Restoration Shaman / Demonology Warlock
- Vigour - Priest
When it comes to heroes, you can swap at any time, and the Quartermaster tokens that you acquire with any hero are usable with any other hero, so you can buy equipment faster for new heroes you are trying out, if you wish to do so.
Leaderboard
Fellowship features dynamic leaderboards that update over weeks and seasons, respectively. The leaderboards as a whole reset per season, and there are rewards that go out at the start of every week depending on the state of the leaderboard the week before. Each week all the players of the same character are compared in how they performed that week, and depending on the spot you have, you earn a trim depending on your position. The trims alter some parts of your armor and aren't considered cosmetics per se, since they are the only "cosmetic" element that will reset each season.
The whole idea of trims is to showcase how good you did throughout the season. The rest of the cosmetics do not get reset, not even from Early Access going into full release.
These are the earnable Trim colors:
- Iron
- Copper
- Bronze
- Silver
- Verdant
- Violet
- Azure
- Crimson
- Onyx
- Gold
- Platinum
Basic Gameplay Loop
Each game begins at the start of a dungeon that the team must traverse, defeating mobs of hostiles and work their way to the boss or bosses depending on the size of the dungeon. Tanks should be on the frontlines drawing attention from enemies to soak up the damage while the DPS characters inflict powerful attacks on the enemies. Meanwhile, healers are focused on supporting both the DPS and Tank characters ensuring they stay alive while staying somewhat away from the fight.
As you and your team traverse a dungeon, you will encounter unlit fire pits. Lighting the campfire sets it a checkpoint. If you die in combat, you will respawn at the most recent campfire and you'll need to catch up with your team. If you are killed before you have reached a campfire, or if you ran by it without interacting with it, then you'll respawn at the start point of the dungeon. If your whole team dies during a boss fight, you will all respawn here and the boss's life bar will be restored fully.
Difficulty & Progression
Fellowship is a game that brings you the core "endgame" experience of other MMOs and MOBAs, but presents that style of progressive play upfront as the central gameplay loop. As such, you will need to run through dungeons to progress and gain armor and loot that will bolster your stats. But what do you do once you plateau and are no longer obtaining loot that is worth equipping? Increase the difficulty.
Increasing the difficulty of a dungeon will bring you better rewards. In order to unlock the next difficulty level, you will have to complete a dungeon on the current highest difficulty level that you have access to. Boss fights may also include new mechanics as you increase the difficulty.
Since the game has pre-set heroes, progression on the character side is mostly tied to gear. You can acquire gear from the gear vendor using the rewards you earn in every run. Ranked runs will also have a chance to provide gear pieces. These are also pre-modelled and created, so there's no proper crafting, although gear can be leveled up. Whatever typo of gear you have equipped adds up to the Iteam Level number. Some dungeon runs and difficulty combinations require or suggest a specific Item Level.
Initiating Fights
As you traverse a dungeon, you will encounter countless hostiles on your way to the boss. Initiating a fight with a mob is as simple as attacking them. But they will also just attack when you come close. They will focus on the first player that they see. The Tank player should be the one pulling enemies and deciding the stopping points where the party can take care of however many enemies the tank pulled. An effective tank will be aware of how many mobs and what type the party can handle, and should be ready to taunt and get more attention to themselves to keep the party safe.
Spirit Ability
After you complete your first dungeon with a hero, you will unlock that hero's Spirit ability. The ability will slowly charge throughout the course of play but can be sped up by defeating enemies. Once it is charged, this ability is typically rather potent. As you contend with groups of enemies as a team, defeating enemies will net Spirit increases that are distributed to your team. There are also some pieces of equipment that can grant a Spirit Stat that aids in the charging speed of your Spirit ability.
The Stronghold Hub
In between every dungeon run, you'll find yourself in the Stronghold hub, which is essentially a lobby area for you to switch out heroes and manage your talents and equipment. Other players will appear in this hub, and should you wish to recruit for a specific dungeon or difficulty (or both), you can chat with those in the lobby here and do just that.
You can also select the mode of play you wish to engage in at the Stronghold. You can select whether you want to run smaller dungeons with quickplay or head into the meatier experiences under Ranked Dungeons. At some point, Raids will likely be added to this catalogue.
As it stands, here's what you can do in The Stronghold:
- Swap between heroes
- Equip new gear and talents
- Join Quick Play or Ranked Dungeon matchmaking
- Train abilities on combat dummies
Combat Strategy
Combat is a key element of Fellowship. It's the abilities and strength of players attacks that ultimately determine success. As such, Combat is more nuanced as it takes a team all fulfilling their roles in order to complete a dungeon successfully.
