A single hero can make a difference in the battle for Middle-earth, but a fellowship of sharp companions working in concert can perform great feats that no single warrior can achieve alone. Fellowship Manoeuvres give a coordinated group of heroes a profound advantage in combat against the most hale and fearsome foes. It is solidarity in the face of bloodlust and malice that gives the Free Peoples their edge against the Enemy, and Fellowship Manoeuvres turn that solidarity into vanquishing strikes and rescuing heals.


"There’s a bold, unmistakable display of power whenever a Fellowship Manoeuvre is performed. This manoeuvre clearly makes use of the skills Ent’s Strength (Red), Stallion’s Spirit (Blue), and Eagle’s Cry (Green)."

In short, a Fellowship Manoeuvre is a combo attack in which each member of the fellowship potentially contributes one Fellowship skill to the combination. Different combinations of Fellowship skills result in different, distinctive Fellowship Manoeuvres. One combination might yield a potent and coordinated melee attack, while another might invoke an effect that heals the fellowship’s Morale over time. The more characters that successfully contribute to the combo recipe, the more powerful the Fellowship Manoeuvre’s effects.

Any character with a stout heart, a cool head, and at least 12 levels under his belt can contribute to a Fellowship Manoeuvre, and a well-timed manoeuvre can mean the difference between victory and defeat against even the most terrible foes.

What a Fellowship Manoeuvre Is
Fellowship Manoeuvres offer a tactical edge that solo characters do not have on their own. With a bit of coordination, even just a pair of stalwart heroes can perform fierce attacks or rallying displays that neither could manage alone.

(A note for players doing more research on Fellowship Manoeuvres (FMs): In the past, Fellow Manoeuvres had also been called Conjunctions (CJs). Some players still call them that. So if you are searching the Lord of the Rings Online forums or chatting with another player and you see a reference to a Conjunction, rest assured that they are the same thing.)


"Any fellowship with two or more participants can execute a Fellowship Manoeuvre. Even the shortest FMs (pairs) create formidable effects, from spectral, stomping Ents to backstabbing spiders."

The opportunity to perform a Fellowship Manoeuvre opens up when an Elite or otherwise exceptional target has its defences broken in battle. (Look for the combat message, “[Character’s name] has broken the defenses of [target’s name].” ) Any character in a fellowship has a small chance of invoking this opportunity, but Burglars can create Fellowship Manoeuvre opportunities with skills like Exploit Opening, Trip, and Exposed Throat, or by using a Bag of Marbles; Guardian skills like Turn the Tables, To the King, and Fray the Edge do the same.

If you see a bull’s-eye icon surrounded by a circle of arrows on your screen, it means someone in your fellowship has broken the defences of a creature you are not currently targeting. Click the icon to target the vulnerable enemy.

A target with broken defences is temporarily stunned (so a target with stun immunity is also immune to FMs), giving the fellowship a few desperate seconds to coordinate its attacks. It is during these vital moments that a new part of the UI appears: the Fellowship Skill Wheel.

The Fellowship Skill Wheel
The mechanism at the heart of every Fellowship Manoeuvre is a contextual pop-up UI panel called the Wheel. When a Fellowship Manoeuvre is possible, the Wheel pops up automatically. It’s a diamond-shaped array of four colored buttons. The red and yellow buttons at top and bottom deal damage to the target, while the green and blue buttons at right and left heal Morale or Power. Click one of those buttons, and you have contributed your part to the Fellowship Manoeuvre.

It’s that easy, but it is not that simplistic. It takes careful timing and great teamwork to pull off the most spectacular Fellowship Manoeuvres.



First, make sure you know what each button and its associated Fellowship skill adds to the finished manoeuvre:

• Ent’s Strength (Red): This represents a powerful melee attack that deals immediate damage to the target.
  
• Eagle’s Cry (Green): This contributes a valiant blow that restores Morale to the character or the fellowship.
  
• Spider’s Guile (Yellow): This represents a cunning strike that deals damage to the target over time.
  
• Stallion’s Spirit (Blue): This contributes an inspiring display that restores Power to the character or the fellowship.

"Some Fellowship Manoeuvres utilizing the blue Stallion’s Spirit skill summon Oath-breaker spirits to fight on behalf on the fellowship. These spirits, battling to reclaim their honour, continue to fight even after the manoeuvre that summoned them has passed."

Unless you are playing a Hunter, you must be at melee range with the target to use Ent’s Strength and Spider’s Guile. Eagle’s Cry and Stallion’s Spirit are available even when you are outside of melee range.

The button you press determines the effect on your character, even if your fellowship doesn’t manage to pull off a powerful combo. If you are hurting and you select Eagle’s Cry, your character gets a small Morale boost. That’s a fine start, but Fellowship Manoeuvres are about creating phenomenal effects that no one character could create on his own.

When the Wheel pops up, you also see a row of empty circles, one for each member of your fellowship. Those circles fill up from left to right with coloured icons as each player in the fellowship presses a button on his or her Wheel.

The order in which those icons are added to the FM makes all the difference. A random collection of icons added into the mix may hurt the target a little bit and heal one character or another to some degree, but certain combinations of Fellowship skills create effects far greater than the sum of their parts. The right icons in the right order can devastate foes or heal the whole fellowship. It just takes teamwork.

The Language of Manoeuvres
There are dozens of possible Fellowship Manoeuvres built into the game. Each one has its own unique combination of icons that must be added to the Fellowship Manoeuvre in a particular sequence in order to be triggered.

Memorising every FM in the game doesn’t sound like fun, and you probably don’t have time to check the Fellowship Manoeuvres tab on your character panel in the midst of a heated battle. Fortunately, you don’t have to that. There’s a language to Fellowship Manoeuvre recipes that’s easy to learn and can guide you naturally to the discovery of new manoeuvres.


"The target of a Fellowship Manoeuvre is stunned for the few seconds the fellowship has to select its skills. Here, three heroes have already selected Ent’s Strength (Red) and are ready to strike together. One more Red icon will make the difference between the three-icon flush, Resounding Strikes, and the four-icon flush, Hail of Blows."


Fellowship Manoeuvre recipes fall into a few basic types with names that might be familiar to poker players:

• Flushes: A Fellowship Manoeuvre made up entirely of icons of a single colour is called a flush.
  
• Pairs: A flush that’s two-icons long is called a pair. Some Fellowship Manoeuvres consist of two pairs, like Yellow + Yellow + Blue + Blue (called Deadly Whispers).
  
• Set: A flush that’s three-icons long is called a set.
  
• Full House: A full house is a manoeuvre made up of a set and a pair, such as Red + Red + Red + Yellow + Yellow (called Ent’s Rage).
  
• Straight: When the icons are played in sequence, going around the Wheel from one colour to the next, that’s a straight. It doesn’t matter if the icons go clockwise or anticlockwise as long as the right combination of icons is played sequence. Thus, Yellow + Blue + Red and Red + Blue + Yellow yield the same Fellowship Manoeuvre (called Sinister Plan).
  
• Unique Combinations: A few six-icon Fellowship Manoeuvres are formed by unique patterns of icons. For example, the manoeuvre called Hew the Stone: Red + Red + Red + Red + Red + Blue

"In the chaos of combat, Fellowship Manoeuvres can be tricky to track and execute. Look closely for the poor Orc at the heart of these smashing Ent-spirits and note the blue ring effects at the feet of the four close-quarters combatants participating in the manoeuvre."


The size of the fellowship sets the limits as to what types of FMs can be performed:

• Two-person manoeuvres can be pairs.
  
• Three-person manoeuvres can be flushes or straights.
  
• Four-person manoeuvres can be flushes, straights, or pairs of pairs.
  
• Five-person manoeuvres can be full houses and straights.
  
• Six-person manoeuvres can be straights or unique combinations.

Note that longer straights go all the way around the Wheel, using the same colour more than once. For example, the five-person manoeuvre called Wrath of the Oath-breakers requires the whole sequence of icons starting and ending with Stallion’s Spirit.

Once you know the basic architecture of Fellowship Manoeuvres, it is easy to puzzle out a few you may not have discovered yet. The next trick is learning to coordinate your actions together, as a fellowship, to perform the most complex manoeuvres.

Executing a Fellowship Manoeuvre
Some Fellowship Manoeuvres are triggered by happenstance, like when everyone in a four-person fellowship on the verge of defeat happens to hit Eagle’s Cry and trigger the Call to Arms manoeuvre. (This creates a heal-over-time effect for the whole fellowship.) But you can’t count on luck. Performing the most robust Fellowship Manoeuvres takes teamwork and communication. A little practice doesn’t hurt either.

The best thing you can do is to prepare an order-of-operations in advance, before you encounter the first Elite monster on your journey. Assign an order of action to each player and stick to it. Then decide what Fellowship Manoeuvre you wish to try, and make sure everyone knows the right combination required to pull it off.

There is no shortcut for this, but you do have a tool at your disposal. The leader of a fellowship can click a check-box next to a known Fellowship Manoeuvre on the tab in her character panel. This puts the combination for the Fellowship Manoeuvre on each player’s screen when the Wheel pops up. This is just as handy as you might imagine.

Also, remember that the four Fellowship skills are still skills. Because of that, they don’t always respond if you are using certain other skills, moving, or in the midst of an auto-attack animation. Keep your head about you. Calmly cancel your current induction or skill use and then click your button on the Wheel to get your Fellowship Manoeuvre into motion.


"It is easy to make a mistake when setting up a Fellowship Manoeuvre. This fellowship has failed to setup the Whispering Leaves full-house manoeuvre (Yellow + Yellow + Yellow + Red + Red). It is invoking the damage-over-time effects of Chaos in the Ranks (4 Yellows) instead. The extra Red icon merely adds a small dose of extra damage to that character’s attack."

Use what you have learned about Fellowship Manoeuvre combos to make the most out of unexpected opportunities. For instances, if you are in a three-person fellowship and two icons of the same colour are already in play, add a third of the same colour to create a flush. By that time, it’s too late to make a straight, and all three-icon Fellowship Manoeuvres automatically form from either straights or flushes. If you see that two panicking comrades have put down two different colours that happen in to be adjacent on the Wheel, make a straight and see what happens.

If you fail to complete a full-sized Fellowship Manoeuvre for your fellowship’s size, you can still complete smaller manoeuvres. Every Fellowship skill played should help someone in the fellowship, at the very least.

If your fellowship winds up fighting over the proper execution of a Fellowship Manoeuvre, you have lost sight of what Fellowship Manoeuvres are about. Remember, the first word is “fellowship.” They’re about camaraderie and mutual support. Keep that in mind, and you will have fun with them every time.