First off, Riders of Rohan increases the level cap by 10, bringing the

new cap up to 85. This feels almost inconsequential - there are few new

skills to be learned between 75 and 85 (and the ones you do train are

mostly just improvements of existing skills), stat caps are no longer

increased and no more morale or power is gained. The three big new things

for this expansion are mounted combat, warbands and the Instanced Public

Questing Areas in Hytbold.

Mounted combat is pretty sweet... when it works, anyway. The system is big

and complex, and like all big, complex new systems it had a lot of

weird, unanticipated bugs during beta testing. This is likely one of the chief causes of the

40-day launch delay - a lot of strange bugs appeared in beta and

necessitated some heavy tweaking. It looks as though the delay was worth it; Turbine squashed the bugs and the system works well at launch.

Mounted combat is the

centerpiece of Riders of Rohan.

Players will find that mounted combat works better in some regions than in

others. Norcroft and Sutcroft, for example, are great for long, fast charges

and broad, arcing turns because there is a lot of land and widely-spaced

enemies. Fangorn, on the other hand, is not conducive to fighting from

horseback. Horses need open space, and there is practically none of that in

Fangorn. Mounted combat also doesn't work all that well in the Wold, where

enemy mobs are more densely packed on the landscape and standing near water,

and it doesn't work at all in enemy camps.

But when it does work, it works well. The war-steed allows players to handle

very challenging enemies without a big group backing them up. My Hunter, for

example, got himself geared up in the full purple armor set from the Ox Clan

Merchant Camp, and at level 78 he was fully capable of taking down a

110,000-morale troll warband boss by himself. Had he attempted the fight on

foot, he would have gotten trounced nearly instantly, but the charging horse

and the mounted attacks evened that playing field.

There is a concern floating around that, if players don't care for the whole

fighting-from-horseback thing, Riders of Rohan has little to offer. While

mounted combat is the clear centerpiece of this expansion, this concern

doesn't carry a lot of weight. It's a lot like Legendary Items were for Mines

of Moria - complex and interesting, but you can realistically get by without

it if you really want to. Every enemy can be fought on foot - though mounted

mobs charging around on horseback are much harder to hit unless you are also

riding. Mounted combat is a new way to experience the region, but the

old-fashioned ways work just as well.

That being said, a lot of Rohan is clearly designed around this new

centerpiece mechanic. Players who don't fall in love with the system may not

find the rest of Rohan as engaging as those who enjoy fighting from horseback.

There is still a lot of other stuff happening in this huge expansion, but some

of it just won't be as shiny and awesome if you don't like mounted combat.

You could fight them on foot

like a sucker, but it's way more fun on the back of your war-steed.

Warbands are one of the features clearly designed around mounted combat.

While there are many of them that can be fought by a solo player on foot

(especially early ones like Cinder, the salamander roaming around in the

Wold), the standard method of fighting warbands will be from horseback.

Typically, warbands consist of a strong "boss" with a clutch of weaker allies.

For the most part, the allies are like the lettuce you get underneath your

restaurant hamburger and fries - annoying and not really a part of the meal.

They can pose a serious threat to solo players, but they don't need to be

killed in order to defeat the warband - just take down the boss and you can

ride away from the adds.

These fights showcase another gameplay-streaming mechanic: automatic quests.

Once you get near a warband, or kill a mob with a ring over its head, or enter

an area with quests associated with it, you'll get an automatic quest

notification. By default, this seems to appear underneath the quest log, but

it can be moved to somewhere less awkward, or the player has the option to

automatically accept all automatic quests. When the quest objectives have been

completed, you either click the auto-quest notification to close it out, or

hand it in at a quest-giver NPC.

Hytbold represents Riders of Rohan's endgame content. Instead of a

traditional instance cluster or raid, Hytbold uses phasing, random repeatable

quests and small instanced spaces that allow characters to rebuild the ruined

settlement.

Hytbold before the crew of Flip

This Town shows up.

Players will be able to start the Hytbold quests as soon as they hit level

84, but in order to get the "feeling" of the place, it might be a good idea to

wait until you have completed all of the daisy-chain regional quests,

finishing up in Snowbourne. The Hytbold quests are all daily repeatables

picked up in surrounding towns rather than in the burned out ruins of Hytbold

itself. The dailies are randomly generated, and typically involve rebuilding

or upgrading one of the many buildings in town. Each building completed

unlocks a new endgame armor piece - so, for example, if you are a Hunter and

you rebuild the Cottage of the Norcrofts, it unlocks the Jacket of the Hytbold

Bowmaster, but if you want the Jacket of the Hytbold Huntsman instead, you

need to complete The Smithy: Superior Forge.

There are also reputation requirements for these unlocks. Players will need

to build their reputations with all of the Rohan factions to build the

complete armor set. Players can only completed a limited number of these

repeatables per day (the daily limit was 5 during beta testing), so it takes a

while to completely rebuild the town, be named Thane and collect the full

armor set.

On the negative side, this grind for gear is a rather dissatisfying

substitute for new instances or skirmishes. It can seem like a time-sink of

repetitive busy-work and may not feel particularly "epic" to some players.

Rise of Isengard had a similar "wet firecracker" endgame issue at launch - the

quests in Isengard didn't add up to 10 full levels, and the last half-level or

so was gained by deeding, re-running old skirmishes or turning in trash loot

for tasks.

Personally, I feel the plus-side rather outweighs the grind here. Because

this content uses souped-up phasing and "Instanced Public Questing Areas," it

means that our hero characters can finally make observable, meaningful changes

to Middle-earth. Daily contributions have a measurable effect on the people

and the landscape. The hero's actions have consequences beyond Dunedain

rangers moving from one instanced room to the next. When you rebuild the mead

hall, it stays rebuilt. The people you convince to move into your town stay

there and render services.