The Best Way to Get Better Gear in Fellowship – Progression Guide
Grindfest incoming.
When you start playing Fellowship with any new character, you literally start from scratch. You have no gear, and you’ll actually play with gear during the first few dungeons.
However, it isn’t always clear what’s the best way to start gearing up, and here’s a quick guide on ways you can get better gear and progress in Fellowship.
Gearing Starter Guide for Fellowship
When you start playing a new character in Fellowship, most of your gear slots are empty. Most of your gear will be item level 1, which is essentially nothing, so you really start from scratch.
After finishing the tutorial, you’ll enter the Stronghold, where you can see all the shops. For gearing early, you have two main options: Quickplay or Challenge (Ranked).
In Quickplay, you can choose any role, and you’ll enter a random party in a random dungeon. Upon finishing the dungeon, you’ll earn Supplies and Marks of Fellowship. Supplies are nice, which are used to buy some Item Level 15 gear, so you have the chance to fill up all your gear slots.
You can buy the Item Level 15 equipment from Quartermaster Novak or the Red Chest Icon (Vendor) on the map.
There are 14 total pieces of gear: Head, Shoulder, Back, Chest, Hands, Legs, Feet, Neck, Wrist, Ring, Ring 2, Relic, Relic 2, and Weapon.
That’s a lot of gear pieces, and since you are starting with basically nothing, getting Supplies from Quickplay is great for filling up every gear slot.
However, that isn’t the best way to get gear early. You’ll want to literally skip to “Challenge” or ranked play and start running Contender 1, 2, or 3 dungeons. Most players will choose Contender 3 difficulty, which is harder compared to Quickplay, but you’ll get better rewards.
In Contender 3, you’ll get a random Item Level 30 gear piece and some gold, with some chance to get some Marks of Fellowship. Since you are getting Item Level 30 gear right off the bat, this method is already better. However, you are also looking to get gold, which is way more important early in the game because you use gold to upgrade your current gear.
Technically, any piece of gear can be upgraded to a higher item level, with its Item Level cap dependent on its rarity. In Contender level gear (green), you can upgrade it 8 times, which goes all the way to Item Level 120.
Since Quickplay doesn’t give gold, you want to run Challenge or Ranked as much as possible.
Dungeon Item Level Loot Index
Here are the Item Level thresholds for each dungeon difficulty, so you have an idea which difficulty to run, especially with regard to your current power level.
| Difficulty | Item Level |
| Contender 1 | 15 |
| Contender 2 | 30 |
| Contender 3 | 30 |
| Contender 4 | 45 |
| Contender 5 | 45 |
| Contender 6 | 60 |
| Contender 7 | 75 |
| Adept 1 | 75 |
| Adept 2 | 90 |
| Adept 3 | 90 |
| Adept 4 | 105 |
| Adept 5 | 105 |
| Adept 6 | 120 |
| Adept 7 | 135 |
| Champion 1 | 135 / 300 (Legendary) |
| Champion 2 | 150 / 300 (Legendary) |
| Champion 3 | 150 / 300 (Legendary) |
| Champion 4 | 165 / 300 (Legendary) |
| Champion 5 | 165 / 300 (Legendary) |
| Champion 6 | 180 / 300 (Legendary) |
| Champion 7 | 195 / 300 (Legendary) |
| Paragon 1 | 195 / 330 (Legendary) |
| Paragon 2 | 210 / 330 (Legendary) |
| Paragon 3 | 210 / 330 (Legendary) |
| Paragon 4 | 225 / 330 (Legendary) |
| Paragon 5 | 225 / 330 (Legendary) |
| Paragon 6 | 240 / 330 (Legendary) |
| Paragon 7 | 255 / 330 (Legendary) |
| Eternal Mode | 270 (Eternal) / 330 (Legendary) |
You have a small chance to get legendary gear when you reach the Champions tier.
Some weapons are exclusive to characters, while legendaries are purely exclusive to each character, having a unique effect specifically designed for their kit. For example, getting a legendary item for Sylvie will have unique effects affecting some of her skills, which could even turn into a different Sylvie build.
Best Way to Get Good Gear in Fellowship – Gearing Strategy
As for the strategy, you want to run the highest possible difficulty you can queue for when playing Challenge mode. When you have no gear at all, you’ll start queuing for purely Contender 1-3 dungeons.
To advance to higher tiers, you must increase your Item Level while getting your Dungeon Rating up. So, every time you queue, you want to choose the most difficult dungeon available and run it until you max out all your gear.
Since there are 14 gear slots, you’ll have to be extremely lucky to get specific drops for the slots you need an upgrade for. This is where the Scrapper and the Blacksmith come in.
When you start getting dupes for your gear slots, you want to scrap them for gold with the Scrapper, as seen in the image above.
It’s going to be extremely hard to completely loot every gear slot, so you’ll eventually want to go to Quartermaster Novak and buy an Item Level 15 gear piece to equip. When you reach Adept by finishing Cithrel’s Fall Capstone Dungeon, you’ll have access to Item Level 75 gear pieces from Quartermaster Novak.
Try to limit your upgrades to Item Level 60 as much as possible. You can finish the first Capstone Dungeon with Item Level 55-65 anyway. The gold cost for upgrades exponentially gets higher, and you don’t want to overupgrade your gear, especially when you can get better ones after finishing the Capstone dungeons.
If you really want to upgrade an item, I suggest choosing an item piece that has your perfect secondary stats for your build, so at least it is a best-in-slot gear that is irreplaceable with the same Item Level gear.
Repeat this until you finish all Capstone dungeons, which would be an insanely tough task without a proper team. The first Capstone dungeon is already a big challenge, but you only have to finish it once and start getting some gear again on the next tier.
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