I've been enjoying Fellowship more than I expected over the weekend—at first, I thought "WoW's Mythic+ without the MMO" would be a glorified daycare for World of Warcraft players who are too old to keep up with newfangled grinds. And I was right (partially because I'm one of them), but also, it's just a really clever little game.
I could talk on and on about how it de-incentivises toxicity, has some really neat boss and class designs, and a progression system that constantly rewards you instead of de-levelling your key and taking your lunch money. And I might. But the thing I'm really impressed by is one tiny little UI feature that solves a problem that's been plaguing World of Warcraft (and other MMOs) for years. Decades, even.
See, in MMOs, a secondary responsibility for damage dealers—other than blasting—is interrupting enemy spellcasting. Usually, specific abilities need to be interrupted or else the pull of that particular dungeon gets way harder. This adds a nice layer of coordination if you're playing with your friends, but let's face it—the majority of dungeon runs are probably done with pick-up groups, right?
In which case, given you're playing with two to three other DPS players (depending on your game), you're going to overlap your kicks. An important cast will come out and you'll all lunge and hit your interrupts all at the same time like a buncha freakin' idiots.
Which is bad, because usually these things have cooldowns and hey, congratulations, you've all just collectively ruined your ability to interrupt these casts for the next 20-30 seconds. Hope you like unnecessary damage! For players who just want to hop in and get some quick 'n' dirty pugs like myself, it's a constant point of frustration. Even when I'm not playing in difficulties that require interrupts, I still wanna be efficient.
Welp, Fellowship's fixed this with a solution so elegant I'm kinda staggered no-one else has done it yet. It's really this simple: You can pre-emptively mark a target as your interrupt target. Doing so puts a little icon of your hero next to the enemy's health bar. When you use your interrupt, it shows that your interrupt's on cooldown and how many seconds are left until it's back up.
In case you wanna use this thing yourself, you can access it via the options menu under "settings > input > set interrupt target." What I really love about this is that it communicates so much information in one swoop:
- "I intend to interrupt this target if it does something bad."
- "My interrupt is on cooldown, because I have successfully interrupted something important."
- Alternatively, if the important spell is being cast and my kick's on cooldown? "I'm a colossal idiot and spent my kick on a spell that deals two damage. Please help me."
All without a single word needing to be called out in a Discord call. This makes Fellowship far more PuG-able than it otherwise would be, which is great for the game as a whole.
As if that wasn't enough, Fellowship ALSO solves the problem of having to futz around trying to click on a moving healthbar while balancing your rotation—you can assign a specialised keybind to interrupt your pre-ordained target regardless of who you're currently hitting, provided you're in range and facing the right way.
Honestly, I would not be mad if every MMO out there simply lifted this system wholesale. It'd be fair play, either way, given Fellowship is just Mythic+ with less bells and whistles attached, and great games exchange ideas all the time.
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
