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.