Fellowship is amazing, but matchmaking isn't cutting it for me anymore

Fellowship is pretty honest about what it is from the start. It’s World of Warcraft dungeons without the rest of World of Warcraft. 

Now, you sweet non-WoW players, you might be thinking “what’s the point of that?” Well, World of Warcraft is a big, sprawling game with tons of stuff to do. And that “stuff” includes a lot of daily quests, leveling, etc. Homework, really. And you have to get gear and levels via homework before you can dive into endgame activities like raids or – the mode that Fellowship is aping – Mythic+ dungeons.

For Fellowship, the entire game is nothing but Mythic+ dungeons, and it’s glorious. Or, rather, it was glorious. Now that I’ve ranked up, I find that it’s quite a bit harder to have fun than it used to be. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

If you’re unfamiliar with Mythic+ dungeons in World of Warcraft, it’s a feature Blizzard added in Legion that scales up the difficulty of a standard dungeon (based on the number after the plus, like a Mythic+ 15) and is timed. You and your group of five have to coordinate your abilities, cooldowns, interrupts, stuns, and more to perfectly blast through the dungeon with time still left on the clock. But you can’t just push to the boss and finish, you also have to kill a certain percentage of enemies in the area. Too few and you can’t leave, too many and you’ve wasted precious time and resources.

Fellowship takes that idea and essentially copy/pastes it. But instead of gearing up from other means, you gear up by … doing easier dungeons! And instead of classes you devote hundreds of hours to, you play characters that have WoW-like skills and rotations, but their own personality and skins that you can use to customize them.

The whole experience is really excellent from the very start. When you have no gear, you jump into quick play matches, which give you currencies that you can use to buy super basic items. But in the quick play match, the game essentially evens the playing field, meaning everyone has a base level and gear doesn’t matter. So you get a sense of what the game will feel like when you’re stronger. 

Once you have a few more pieces of loot, you can jump into rated matches, which start you at the lower tier. As you complete dungeons, you’ll get a rank for that dungeon based on your team’s performance, and you’ll matchmake with other players who have similar experience. As you play harder and harder dungeons, you’ll get loot that comes already upgraded. But you can also spend gold you earn by dismantling unwanted gear to upgrade stuff you got from the easier dungeons.

After you hit a certain level benchmark, you can matchmake for the big, bad, gatekeeping dungeon at the end. Instead of a 15 minute experience with one boss – like the rest of Fellowship’s dungeons – these final challenges have three separate bosses and a much longer timer. Suddenly you’re in a kind of gauntlet, battling alongside your allies to prove that, not only have you mastered your character, but that you’re able to read the game’s mechanics perfectly and come out the other side victorious.