The best parts of my favorite World of Warcraft classes are being turned into new heroes for Fellowship's pre-season 2 update this week
Nobody on the team making Fellowship would deny that World of Warcraft was a massive inspiration for the game—I know, because I've asked them about it. It's not just the art style, but the entire pitch for the game is what would happen if a popular activity in WoW was an entire game.
What impresses me the most is how distinct it feels despite the obvious similarities. Fellowship has a little more MOBA DNA than an MMO, which means its heroes have far fewer abilities and gear options than classes in WoW. This works in its favor because the game isn't about a long grind, but rather a repeatable co-op dungeon experience with queue times and matches.
Fellowship is nearing the launch of its second season and the release of two new heroes: Xavian and Aeona. But before the full season comes out, it's going to drop them both in a "pre-season" update this week.
Xavian is basically all of my favorite parts of playing a paladin in WoW shoved into one character. He cleaves enemies with a big sword, builds up a resource, and then spends that resource on quick healing spells for his allies. Instead of focusing purely on keeping the enemy's attention, his skills help stabilize a team and relieve stress from healers. When I played a paladin in WoW, this was the kind of thing you did when you were good enough at doing your job that you'd find time to help out on the side, so it's neat to see that playstyle reflected in Fellowship.
Aeona is similarly a distillation of a playstyle in WoW turned into a hero. She's a healer who passively turns all direct damage the group receives into a DoT. All her abilities deal damage and heal her allies to fight against that ticking damage—much like a discipline priest in WoW. And her signature ability freezes everyone's health bars and gives her a few seconds to build up a burst of healing that goes out when the freeze ends. WoW has a tank class that has to manage a constant DoT from incoming damage, but Fellowship flipped the idea on its head by making it a healer's problem to solve.
Both of these heroes are fairly big shake-ups to how Fellowship was played for its first season. The initial set of heroes are a little closer to what you'd expect out of an RPG with tanks, healers, and damage-dealers. But Aeona and Xavian have kits that force you to split your focus on killing packs of enemies and keeping your team alive.
Season 2 will have a huge list of changes coming along with it, and I suspect some of the tweaks will rebalance monster damage so that these two characters can fit into people's strategies as they climb into higher difficulties. It won't be long until we find out as the pre-season for season 2 launches on February 19 (with the full season 2 launch at a later date).