Stop Getting Your Ass Kicked in Fellowship: A Beginner's Guide
Fellowship doesn't hold your hand. It shoves you into a dungeon, tells you to figure it out, and then laughs when a giant monster stomps your party into a fine paste.
This game is the pure, uncut endgame experience of an dungeon rpg, without the 100-hour tutorial disguised as a story campaign. So before you become that guy who gets kicked from every group, here are a few things you absolutely need to know to survive your first few runs.
Know Your Fucking Role
This isn't a solo adventure. It's a four-player co-op game built on the holy trinity: one tank, one healer, and two DPS. If you don't know what your job is, you're not just failing yourself; you're dragging three other people down with you.
The Tank's job is to get punched in the face. You go in first, you grab all the enemies, and you make sure they stay focused on you while everyone else does their job. If the healer is dead, it's probably your fault.
The DPS's job is to make the big scary health bars disappear. You stand behind the tank and unload everything you have into the enemies. If the tank dies because the enemies were alive for too long, it's probably your fault.
The Healer's job is to keep the other two idiots alive. You stand back, manage your mana, and make sure the tank's health bar doesn't hit zero. If anyone dies, it's probably your fault. See a pattern here? Do your job.
Quickplay Is Your Training Ground
Don't be a hero and jump straight into the ranked Challenger Mode. You'll just get wrecked and piss everyone off. Start with Quickplay. It's a non-ranked mode with short, easy dungeons that you can finish in about 5 to 10 minutes.
This is your practice range. It’s where you learn your hero's abilities before you become a liability in a run that actually matters. You still get rewards like tokens and Cache Keys, so you're not wasting your time.
For the Love of God, Light the Campfire
As you run through a dungeon, you will see unlit fire pits. These are not decorations. These are your checkpoints. Light them. Every single one of them.
If you die, you respawn at the last campfire you lit. If you die before you've lit a single one, you're hoofing it all the way from the start of the dungeon. Even worse, if your entire team wipes during a boss fight, the boss's health resets to full, and you all respawn at the last campfire. Don't be the reason your team has to start a boss fight from scratch.
How Not to Pull Like a Maniac
If you are not the tank, do not, I repeat, do NOT run ahead and start attacking things. The tank controls the pace. They are the one who should be initiating fights, pulling enemies, and deciding where the party stops to make a stand.
An effective tank knows exactly how many mobs the party can handle at once. A bad DPS who runs off and pulls an extra pack of enemies is how you get a full team wipe and a one-way ticket back to the last campfire.
Interrupts Aren't Optional
This is probably the single most important combat mechanic you need to learn. When a powerful enemy, especially a boss, starts casting a big, flashy attack, a yellow bar will appear over their head. This is your cue to use your Interrupt ability.
Hitting your interrupt at the right time cancels their attack completely, turning the bar red. These abilities have a cooldown, so your team needs to coordinate and rotate them, especially on bosses that love to spam their deadliest moves. A missed interrupt is often a guaranteed death.