Copyright escapistmagazine
Fellowship's early access has, by and large, been a decent time for many players. There's good progress, a solid content loop, and other such features. Many are beginning their ranked play climb, slowly rising through the various tiers of difficulty. However, the big wall appears to be with Fellowship's Adept difficulty, which is proving to be a big wall for many players advancing from Contender. As it stands, it's by and large the most commented on difficulty wall. Contender gives you an outline of the dungeons, some level of route planning, and a theme of how the boss battles work. Yet, going into Adept, you now need to learn what mobs hurt, what mobs to kite, CC, proper kick mechanics, and more. For uncoordinated pug groups, this is starting to become a problem with managing the dungeon route and timing groups for score. It's got to the point where Adept is a talking point in the Reddit, Discord, and Steam communities, more so than other difficulty brackets. If you've played M+ from WoW, you might start recognizing this as the +7-10 wall early on in the season. Image credit: Chief Rebel/Arc Games Tips for beating Fellowship's Adept Dungeons If you're in that group, then there are a few tricks you can use to get better: Start on lower Adept dungeon difficulties: Each dungeon will change massively, which we will go into more detail in the tips below. There will be new boss mechanics, new fixes, and different mobs will have new effects, spells will hit harder or have different priority for kicks than in Contender. So, it's better to go into Adept 2 and learn the fights and see what is different before climbing higher. Item level: Item level can be earned through the Contender Capstone Dungeons. Try that and get more blues before starting Adept. You can also get blue weapons here, which should help your DPS and some build-defining options. Upgrade Gear: If you have decent gear on you for stat priority, spend your gold. Upgrade bad pieces, upgrade your better pieces further. Item level is massive in this game and massively boosts your survivability and DPS, and healing throughput. Take the routes slower: Contender and Quickplay can give you bad habits for mass pulling packs. However, chain pulling is more effective in Adept if you're taking on more item-level equivalent Adept dungeons. Let the tank pull a pack, build their defensive buffs, and get them lower. Then chain pull so it's not as demanding on defensive kit or healing throughput. Press the V key: This is big for Adept and onwards. Interrupt management becomes extremely important moving forward. Spells heal and shield for more, and the damage they deal can nuke health bars now. There are key kicks like Healing Surge, Hydrobolt, Drain Life, the archmage channels from the Wyrmheart, etc, to name a few. There's even a channeled CC in Godfall Quarry that needs interrupting. Pressing V on a mob lets everyone know what mob you're focus is for interrupting. When your interrupt is down, it shows a timer when it's back up. It lets other group members know what to clutch kick or to use your crowd control skills to interrupt some mobs. Time to kite mobs: Some mobs like the red geode enemies in Everdawn Grove are tough; the spinning elves in the Central themed dungeons hurt. As for the Corsairs in Sailors and the Capstone Dungeon, you need to kite the bleeds. These will melt through tanks, so give the tank room to kite these things. Improve boss mechanics: Going into Adept, bosses are much harder. Each one has some new mechanic to respect. Eversong has totems you need to charge and kill. Sailors Abyss boss needs proper dispel placement management and line of sight on the scream. Urrak Markets requires DPS to properly split boss damage as equally as possible to stop empowering the other one, since they will hit harder. Godfall also needs some new drop zone mechanics to avoid the blasts hitting the thing left behind. Respect the new mechanics as they will kill you if you get them wrong. All of these things are lessons you will learn as you play through the game. If you can master these foundation step-ups from Contender into Adept, then you can climb. The same rules apply going into Challenger and Paragon, too, so if you can solve these issues in Adept, then there's nothing stopping you from continuing the harder climb. You can also check the tier list to see how your class is faring too.
