title="Riders of Rohan - Riding to 85 Part 2" />

I'm not the fastest leveler in the world. When Rise of Isengard launched, I had a relatively healthy spine and 12-hour gaming sessions were par for the course, and I was the first one in my kinship to hit 75. With Riders of Rohan, my play-time is a bit more

limited (my back is a year older now, and is as twisted and treacherous as the path to the summit of Weathertop), so I'm not getting the epic play time that I used to. I wanted to get to 85 in a week, so, as mentioned at the end of Riding to 85, Part 1, I decided that I would use the

store-bought XP-boosters as much as possible to wring the most out of my

play-time.

Days 3 - 7: Regional Quests

In order to maximize the effectiveness of the store-bought XP-boosters and

get the most out of that 60-minute turbo-charged window, I used them upon

arriving at the destination of the latest regional quests I had just picked

up. A lot of the time, arriving at the destination, or killing the first mob

or two, will trigger a batch of automatic quests, and these can all be

completed rapid-fire. The XP-booster gives me 60 minutes of warp speed XP

gain, so I buff up with scrolls, food, token and fire-oil and get as much

done as I can within that window.

Keep in mind that the booster also affects quest experience gains - turning

in a task at the local task bulletin board benefits from this also. Loading

up on Punctured Shields and then doing a chain of task turn-ins while under

the influence of the XP buff provided a big happy dollop of creamy whipped

level advancement. It's fairly easy to see how my friend blasted through 10

levels on the very first day of launch using these things.

I ran into the same issue with this expansion that I ran into with Rise of

Isengard: storage space. Even with the sixth inventory bag that came with

the Legendary Edition pre-order, I kept running out of bag space. As my

character gets more and more powerful, he requires more and more support

items to maintain a hard pace, and these items take up a lot of room. My

character is a Hunter, so bags 1 through 3 are generally packed with:

Traveling rations

Morale and Power potions of varying potencies

Curative potions, half a stack of each

At least 3 kinds of food (regen, buff, resist), and usually more than

that

that Edhelharn tokens

Crafted traps

Fire oil

Light oil

Bow chants, 3 types

Battle and Warding lore scrolls

Store-bought XP enhancers and task limit resets

Third Age LIs I'm leveling to grind into relics

Item Experience runes

My Hunter is an Explorer, so bag 4 is generally stuffed with crafting

materials. Usually, when I gather a full stack of anything, I deposit that

in the vault, but there are still a lot of materials to be gathered. Two

kinds of ore, two kinds of wood, hides, two kinds of Scholar items, soil for

Farmers, herbs for Cooks - this stuff all takes up space. Then there are the

recipe scrolls, two types (Eastemnet with the common, lower-level recipes

and Riddermark with the single-use and uncommon recipes) for each craft.

Scrolls and IXP runes consume a lot of inventory real estate, and often

overflow into bag 5 after they are done filling the gaps in bags 3 and 4.

That leaves approximately 2 bags for all the stuff that gets crammed into

my inventory while questing. Two bags doesn't take long to fill. The only

solution was to pare down my necessities to the barest of minimums and leave

behind any "raid gear" that I probably wouldn't need for landscape-questing.

It felt like I was running around naked.

This, of course, brings up another discovery I made during this period.

There's an awesome new Dwarf-only store cosmetic that I couldn't resist. At

995 TP and restricted to just one race, it's ludicrously over-priced, but

the Bare Chested top was a must-have for my Dwarf Minstrel:

I had always envisioned my Minstrel as a hardcore metal singer. The Cookie

Monster growls demoralize the enemy, but hitting the Bruce Dickinson highs

makes your fellowship want to keep on rockin'. Give him some gnarly

dreadlocks, black pants and high boots, he could be a member of any number

of modern metal bands. If only we could add tattoos...

Day 8 and Beyond: Hytbold

As soon as I hit level 84, I got an in-game mail from Edgal in Hytbold

requesting assistance. When you first arrive at Hytbold, it's a blackened,

broken ruin of a former town. With a bit of hard work and some elbow grease,

you can fix it up and restore it to its former glory, and be named a Thane

of Rohan in the process.

The first task you receive when arriving at Hytbold is simple exploration -

you run around the town looking at the broken buildings and figuring out how

the restoration projects can proceed. Once you're finished that, return to

Edgal in Hytbold and he will have a long list of tasks that need doing

throughout the town. You can pick up every quest in the list if you have the

room in your quest log, but you won't be finishing them all at once.

Each of the tasks bestowed by Edgal requires a number of Hytbold tokens,

which are earned by completing repeatable quests in Eaworth, Cliving and

Snowbourne, and some of the upgrades also require high standing with the

various new Rohan regional factions. You can accept as many of these quests

as you want, but you can only complete 5 of them per day. Once you turn in

the 5th daily quest, the remainder are cancelled out and automatically

fail.

Most of these dailies come in the form of public instances - instanced

spaces that are open to several players at once, with rapid mob respawns and

small-ish explorable areas. Like the rest of Rohan, you don't need to be in

a fellowship with other people in the instance. If you contribute to a

fight, you get full credit for the kill. This can come in handy in some

areas where tough mobs respawn very fast. The troll cave quest picked up in

Eaworth is a good example of this - my Hunter was fairly quickly overwhelmed

by a pair of tough wood-trolls, but a Rune-keeper happened to wander into

the fight partway through and kept me alive while I took the trolls down.

When the same thing happened to him after I had finished my objectives, I

helped him out as well, and we both got full credit. Good stuff.

It's not all sunshine and happiness, though. Some of the quests are

terrible. A chronically-laggy connection makes it difficult for me to

complete some kinds of jumping puzzles, but one of the daily quests I picked

up involved climbing to the top of a broken watch-tower by jumping from one

precariously-thin beam to another. I fell a number of times and almost

rage-quit, but eventually reached the top. On the plus side, if you never

want to do this quest, you never have to - there are lots of other quests

you can do instead to complete your dailies, and you can just cancel or

auto-fail the horrible jumping puzzle. If you want to complete the

associated deed, you need to do the puzzle just once, and then you never

have to do it again.

These quests can be run solo or with a group. Either way, the reward is the

same - 5 tokens per quest, 25 tokens per day. It will take a minimum of 44

days to complete every upgrade, and another 8 - 13 days to purchase a

complete armor set. That may seem like a lot, but remember that Hytbold is a

very large town. Your character is essentially rebuilding a settlement

roughly the size of Bree-town out of ashes and ruin.

Completing the 5 daily quests rewarded me with 25 Hytbold tokens, which I

carried back to the ruined town and proceeded to spend on repairing the Mead

Hall. The Mead Hall, the largest building in the center of the town, seemed

like a natural place to start. Purchasing the upgrades from (guy) gives an

immediate result - I watched as the Mead Hall turned from a black, burnt-out

wreck to a glorious gold-and-red-wood community center. I spent all my

tokens on Mead Hall upgrades, but it wasn't quite enough for a full

restoration - the inside is still pretty nasty, and there are no people in

it yet. This is all done with phasing - the more you complete, the more

stuff gets phased in for you to use. Every time you enter Hytbold, you are

entering "your" version of the town - if you are traveling with another

player who has rebuilt more or different parts of the town, you won't have

access to his facilities, nor he to yours.

The same tokens used to restore Hytbold to glory are used to buy the new

teal endgame armor set, and the pieces of this armor set are unlocked by

purchasing the town upgrades. For example, as a Hunter, I can unlock the

Shoulderpads of the Hytbold Bowmaster by completing The Mead Hall: Interior

Enhancements I. If I want the boots for that set, I need to complete The

Palisade: Rebuild VII, which requires Ally standing with the Entwash

faction. Each armor piece has a separate upgrade/rep requirement, and you

will need to pretty much rebuild the whole town to get the full set. This

gating is for purchase only - you don't need the rep or the rebuilds to

equip the stuff, just to buy it.

Each class has access to 3 new armor sets, in keeping with the tradition

started with the Tower of Orthanc armor sets. Each set compliments one trait

line, so the red set will usually enhance DPS, the blue set will usually

enhance support abilities and the yellow set will usually enhance CC or

"combat flow" abilities. Complete sets range in price - the least expensive

set is 205 tokens, and the most expensive is 310 (both sets are for Wardens;

most other sets are typically between 250 - 300 or so). It will take a

minimum of 8 - 13 days to collect enough tokens to buy a complete set, in

addition to the 44 it takes to rebuild all of Hytbold.

Each upgrade unlocks something. There are 162 possible upgrades and 162

armor pieces in total (9 classes times 3 trait lines times six pieces per

set). When Hytbold is completely rebuilt, you will be able to watch the

conclusion of the Eastemnet's story arc, and barter merchants for all

classes will phase in around the Mead Hall. Since the armor is bound to

account rather than character, once you reach this stage you can buy armor

for your alts.

I hit 85 during the Hytbold quests, but there was still a lot left to do. I

had barely scratched the surface in some areas - for example, I had not yet

done any quests in Sutcrofts, or explored much of Fangorn (or figured out

why, exactly, Gandalf is standing there near Treebeard's hill - I thought

that would be explained in the epics, but it was not).

I did follow the epic story to its conclusion after hitting 85. I won't

spoil the story (except to say that it's excellent!), but the last reward

for the end of Book 9 is a level 85 Second Age bridle for your war-steed. If

you want a Second Age weapon or class item, you'll need to join in on

warband fights - one player on Arkenstone reported finding a Tarnished

Symbol of Celebrimbor in the reward box from Bugud, and others have reported

finding them in other tough warbands in Sutcrofts.

This is Rohan's endgame content - for now, at least. Turbine announced

early on that Riders of Rohan would not ship with an instance cluster, but

that one would arrive sometime before the end of the year. Whether the

delayed launch of the expansion will affect the timely launch of the

instance cluster update is anyone's guess at this point.

How has your experience with Riders of Rohan been so far? Let us know in our comments!