What each party size can enter today
Hallowgrove supports solo play. Brandrgarde is gated to three-player squads. There is no duo queue at all. Those three sentences answer the question most people ask before buying, and they are the structure everything else in this article hangs off.
That means a player with no regular group has one of the two published raid regions fully available and the other one closed. It is not a soft restriction you can talk your way past by being well geared, and it does not open up at higher character levels. If you intend to play alone, you are choosing Hallowgrove as your home area for now.
It also means a pair of friends is in the most awkward position the game currently creates. Two people cannot queue as two. Their real options are to play separate solo raids, to find a third, or to queue as a trio with fill enabled and accept a stranger. None of those is a duo, and the developers have been direct about why.
There is no duo queue, and that is a decision
The developers have stated that a duo queue is not coming soon, and their reason is matchmaking pool fragmentation: adding a third party size splits the same population across more queues and lengthens waits for everybody. Whether you agree with the trade, it is a deliberate choice rather than an oversight, and it is one of the loudest complaints in the community.
The practical consequence is that a pair should stop waiting for the feature and pick a workaround they can live with. Queuing as a trio with fill on is the closest thing to duo play, with the caveat that the third player is a stranger whose loot expectations you have not agreed. Playing separate solo raids in Hallowgrove is the alternative, and it is more fun than it sounds if you treat it as a shared session rather than a shared run.
What you should not do is have two people queue separately and try to meet inside the same match. The developers define illegal teaming as multiple players deliberately entering the same match in order to work together against others, and the penalty escalates from matchmaking suspension to a permanent ban. They have separately clarified that spontaneous truces struck between strangers inside a match are not the target — the offence is the coordination beforehand, which is exactly what two friends dodging the queue restriction would be doing.
The trio gate is not described as permanent
On solo access to Brandrgarde, the developers have said they may open it to solo players for a limited time during the season. No date, no duration and no conditions have been announced, so this is not something to plan a purchase around, but it does mean the gate should not be described as a permanent fact of the game.
Treat it the way you would treat any announced-but-undated feature: useful to know, not useful to wait for. If Brandrgarde access matters to you now, the answer is to find two other players now. If a limited solo window arrives later, you will be better prepared for it having already learned the area's extraction rules, which work differently from Hallowgrove's and are covered in how the exit sequence actually works.
The wider point is that party-size access in this game is live policy rather than fixed architecture. It has already changed once in the developers' stated plans, and it may change again, which is a good reason to confirm the current state in game rather than trust anything written a month ago, this article included.
What the gate actually costs a solo player
The first cost is narrative. Part of the main task chain runs through Brandrgarde, so a solo player will hit points in the story they cannot complete alone. This is the specific grievance behind a good share of the refund complaints at launch, and it is worth understanding before you invest a week into a solo character.
The second cost is variety. The two regions are shaped very differently, and the map counts make the contrast legible. Hallowgrove publishes 2,942 markers on its surface floor, including roughly 1,900 enemy positions, 770 treasure points and 22 extraction markers, alongside portals and vendor positions. Brandrgarde South publishes 1,555 markers with about 636 enemies but 38 extraction markers and 13 vendor positions, and Brandrgarde North publishes 1,786 with 880 enemies, 723 treasure points and a single portal.
Read those ratios rather than the totals. Hallowgrove is dense with enemies relative to its exits, which suits a solo player who can pick fights and avoid others. Brandrgarde South carries far more extraction options against fewer enemies, which is what a coordinated squad wants when it is trying to leave with a heavy haul. All of these are possible positions rather than guaranteed spawns — the interactive map says as much on every layer.
Solo, solo queue and fill-off trios are three different games
Nobody documents this and it matters more than the access rules. Playing solo means you are alone against a lobby that contains squads. Queuing solo into a squad slot with fill means you are in a trio with two strangers, which changes the fights you can take but not the loot discipline you can rely on. Queuing as a trio with fill turned off means you enter short-handed against full squads, which is the hardest of the three and the one people select by accident.
The last of those deserves a warning. A pair who turn fill off to avoid a stranger are voluntarily entering a three-player mode with two players, against opponents who mostly have three. If you are going to play as two, understand that you are taking a structural disadvantage in every contested fight, and adjust: fight less, leave earlier, and carry less.
Matches also contain bots by design, and the developers have said that is permanent rather than a launch stopgap. That changes how a lobby reads for a solo player, because not everything you meet is a person, and treating every contact as a full-strength hunter will make you far too passive.
Choosing a class for the party size you actually play
Class choice interacts with party size more than it interacts with tier lists. The Seer is the only healing class, and community practice treats it as close to mandatory in a trio, with the Reverent path and a Catalyst as the squad configuration. The same class's Blasphemer path with a Mace is how solo Seer players describe running it. The oath is switched from the Skills screen, which many players never find.
For solo play, the community's strongest observation is not about damage at all. Solo is hard-counter territory: you cannot see the opposing class before you commit, so spending limited skill slots on an answer to one class leaves you helpless against another. That argues for self-sufficiency and disengagement over specialisation, which is a large part of why Shadowstrix is so visible in solo play — its escape tools convert lost fights into survived runs. That last point is a community reading of one week of a live game, not a balance statement.
The published baselines are identical across all six classes for attack, defense and health, so the real differences are in weapons, critical damage, dodge capacity and how forgiving the class is while you learn. Compare them on the class database, and read which class to play first before committing, since changing class later requires an empty inventory and no equipped gear.
Playing with friends across regions
The restriction people discover last is geographic. Servers run in five countries, and there is a regional build lock: accounts registered in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands download the North American build and can only reach North American servers. Cross-platform matchmaking is supported, and both PS5 and Xbox controllers work, but the build lock is not something crossplay solves.
If you are assembling a trio specifically to unlock Brandrgarde, confirm before anyone buys that everyone's account region can reach the same servers. Finding out afterwards is a genuinely unrecoverable problem, and the workarounds circulating in the community are unofficial and unsupported.
Latency also shapes which party size is viable. Solo play tolerates a worse connection than squad play, because coordinated fights and revives punish delay harder than a solo disengagement does. If your only reachable server is far away, a solo Hallowgrove routine may simply be the better game for you.
Where to go next
Decide which of the three modes above you are actually going to play this week, then set up for that one rather than for all of them. If it is solo Hallowgrove, spend the setup time on the interactive map and in the Hallowgrove area guide, learning where extraction clusters sit and building a loop you can reverse.
If it is a trio, agree loot rules and roles before you queue, and build the squad's kits together in the loadout lab so nobody is carrying gear the group cannot afford to lose. Either way, what a death actually costs you is the article that makes those conversations short.