title="Riders of Rohan - Riding to 85, Part 1" />

When Riders of Rohan went live on Monday, I couldn't wait

to fire up the Lord of the

Rings Online and play. I had put hours and hours into beta in

the name of research for Our

Review of the expansion, and I was very pleased with the changes and

new stuff. Couldn't wait to try them "for real" on my characters on live.

Before the expansion went live, I did some preparation work. I whipped up a

bunch of crafting guild rep items, two full batches for each of my guilded

crafters. I made plenty of consumables with my Scholar. I spent a couple of

hours earning Lothlorien silver branches. Then the servers went down for the

patch, and it was a waiting game.

Day One: Launch Day

LotRO servers came back up at noon, and lots of players were able to get

patched up and logged in by 12:15. Some of us took much longer to patch - I

started patching bright and early in the morning, and didn't finish until

late in the evening. Rural internet connections are awesome.

Unfortunately, launch day was tarnished by some rather nasty glitches.

Launcher errors prevented many players from entering the game at all, and a

lingering memory error caused the game to crash repeatedly for some others

who did manage to get in. These errors are severe and consistent enough that

Turbine put together a hotfix for Wednesday morning.

For those of us who could get in and play without the errors - and I don't

mean to rub salt in any wounds here - Riders of Rohan is pretty badass. My

Hobbit Hunter, Gunkydoc, started out in Caras Galadhon, where I had earned

enough silver branches to be able to afford the new Hunter skill, Guide to

Caras Galadhon. It's one of the smaller updates to LotRO, but it's

definitely about time we finally got a port to Lothlorien. I also got the

new travel skill to Hrimbarg in the Misty Mountains, though this one is less

important.

I decided I wanted to get a war-steed fast, so I entered Rohan via the

bridge at the southern edge of the Great River area rather than following

the epic books. The epics also earn you a war-steed, but it takes a book and

a half to do it, and I didn't feel like climbing all over Caras Galadhon. I

got my war-steed within about 2 hours, and encountered my new favorite

enemy: the Wold Draug.

These guys are located in a cave across the swamp from Langhold. They start

out normal-sized, but they get bigger and bigger throughout the fight as

they keep taking damage. When they finally die, they swell up and burst in a

green goo-splosion. The Draugar are named like Skyrim monsters and look like

Deadites from the Evil Dead movies. Awesome.

By the time I had finished getting my war-steed, a friend of mine, Khaurin

Quickbow, announced on glff that he had already reached level 85. It took him

10 hours, 54 minutes, and when he reached 85 he was still wearing pretty much

all of his level 75 raid gear. I have a theory about how he did it this fast,

based on what he told me after he did nearly the same thing in Rise of

Isengard:

Pre-launch, he would have loaded up on quests - repeatables, region quests

from the Great River area, whatever he could find - and completed them all

without turning anything in.

from the Great River area, whatever he could find - and completed them all without turning anything in. He would have bought the Enhanced XP Destiny Perk, plus the store

equivalent. I have a bunch of those myself that I won in lotteries, etc.

equivalent. I have a bunch of those myself that I won in lotteries, etc. On launch day, he turns in every completed quest in his log.

Then he heads to Rohan and tears through the region quests, probably with

a group. It's unlikely that he did the epic quests at the same time - they

are slower paced and he would have gotten more XP from killing mobs.

Khaurin's kind of bloody-minded blind rush to level cap is not going to be

for everyone. There's a lot to experience along the way, and taking the

occasional pause to absorb the fantastic scenery, listen to the epic score or

read the quest dialogue makes the game a lot more enjoyable for some. For

Khaurin, who is a raid-leader type, the accomplishment is a rush, and he now

has time to take in everything at his leisure, while still being in good form

for the new endgame and leading his troops to success.

Once I got my war-steed, I wanted to tackle some war bands with my kinsmen.

I'd been greatly looking forward to that since beta testing, and it was pretty

much exactly what I had hoped it would be. We did a sweep of all the war bands

in the Wold, charging from one to the next and watching for respawns when we

got to a location too late to join in.

This is one of the reasons the new Open Tapping system is great. If we

arrived at a war band location to find another group already engaged with it,

we didn't have to just sit around like a bunch of dummies and queue up for the

next repop. We could get in there, tag the leader, help take out the adds and

make a meaningful contribution, and gain all the benefits of taking the boss

down as if we had been there from the start. For this reason, Rohan feels a

lot more co-operative than other areas.

Of course, no launch would be complete without launch-day bugs. The Monday

bugs called for a Wednesday hotfix to patch up some memory errors, but some

lingering glitches yet persist. Players are being told that the vendors in

their housing instances are "restricted areas" and being shuttled out. Some

players are experiencing issues with the chat servers, or the

willfully-persistent lag spikes that have been problematic for a while now.

Lag is especially problematic when dealing with mounted combat. I typically

run at fairly high network latency normally, and when I get slow days the

latency spikes up to 400 - 700+ milliseconds. In other words, it takes around

half a second for a mouse click or twitch to have an effect in game. For most

stuff, this isn't a big deal. I can make compensations with my mouse clicking

while fighting, and most fights aren't live-or-die competitions where half a

second makes the difference. Even normal riding is usually fine. I can swerve

or jump in time to avoid obstacles, and I can even win festival races with

latency that high.

But mounted combat is a horse of a different color. It is far more sensitive

to lag of any kind because the system makes a lot of calculations all the

time. Speed and Fury meters are variable, and steering requires complex math

equations that must be performed with every micro-adjustment you make to your

trajectory. Lag of any kind - graphical lag, server lag, network latency lag -

causes strange, elastic stuttering in the war-steed's movement. It's not quite

the same thing as "rubber-banding," where the running character bounces back

and forth between two spots over and over. It's more like the camera keeps

switching back and forth from high speed to low speed. The horse will slow

down, then flash forward, then slow way down again. This isn't a huge issue at

lower speeds, but in a top-speed cross-country charge, or during a long fight

against a powerful war band, high latency can make mounted combat nearly

unusable. You have no clear idea where your rider is on the map or in relation

to your enemies.

Fixing lag can be pretty simple. If it's the graphics that are stumping you,

open up your Advanced Graphics options and disable Frill Distance and Distant

Imposters. These two items alone should improve mounted combat performance if

you find your framerates are suffering. In the case of network latency, which

can have a much more profound impact on performance, try turning off all

background programs and applications that use up your bandwidth. Internet

browsers, media streams, torrent clients and other such bandwidth hogs can

ramp up your latency, even if they are running on other computers sharing your

connection. Turning these off on my game rig and my laptop made a significant

change to my game's performance, changing mounted combat from an unplayable

mess to the exhilarating thrill-ride it's supposed to be.

Because of this lag-sensitivity, however, there are a lot of situations where

the old-style standard mounts are a better choice. Riding through town, for

example, can be a choppy obstacle course nightmare on a war-steed, even at

lower speeds. And if you experience high network latency (over 100 ms or so)

on a regular basis, a standard mount might be a better choice for

cross-country travel. So don't pull those premium goats and class steeds off

your skill bar just yet.

Day 2: Epics

On day 2, I focused mostly on the epic story. For a lot of people, this is

the preferred introduction to Rohan because it's the continuation of the story

that we have been waiting for since the Great River update.

Book 7 - the first of three that come with this update - focuses on the

breakup of the Fellowship of the Ring. The story picks back up at Caras

Galadhon with the Dunlending warrior-woman Nona, the elf Corudan, and Horn the

Rohirrim, and follows a breadcrumb trail to Nen Harn to discover the fate of

Frodo and his crew. Through session play, we see the dissolution of the

Fellowship through different perspectives.

As Frodo, we get an intimate look at his decision to part ways with the

Fellowship. He reflects on the counsel of the wise as he wanders aimlessly,

until he meets up with Boromir, who illustrates the corrupting influence of

the ring in a very personal way. The cool thing about this session is that you

actually get to put on the One Ring (by means of a skill) to escape.

The next sessions involve Boromir, and we are given a glimpse into the

thought processes that drive him to madness. We also get a glimpse at his

opinion of his traveling companions:

But don't worry! In the next play session, he heroically defends The Halfling

and The Other Halfling to his dying breath. In the last of these epic

sessions, you play as Samwise, who has but one skill, which he uses to

determine that Frodo would make a bee-line for the boats.

The other thing I decided to do was to use some of the store-bought XP

enhancers to accelerate my trip to level cap. For 600 TP, you get five 100% XP

Boost (1hr) buffs, which doubles the amount of XP you earn from kills and from

quests. If you're working on fast leveling, this is almost like cheating,

especially if it's paired with blue-bar enhanced XP. I burned through a level

in about an hour and a half with this setup.