Welcome to the first installment of The Rohan Report, a feature that's one part informal diary and one part Riders of Rohan™ guide. Beyond sharing, in brief, early portions of Eastern Rohan quest content, this feature provides various tips and tricks on Mounted Combat and other portions of this LOTRO expansion.

I hope you love horses, because there will be horses.

Oct. 15th – 19th: Launch Week

Obligatory Happy Riders of Rohan Launch!

The time is neigh. Wait, no, whinny—I mean now. The time is now.

Sorry.

I've arrived in Eastern Rohan; specifically, the northern region of The Wold, which itself is in northeastern, uh, Eastern Rohan. Let's check the map, like I did so many times in beta.

The first leg of Riders of Rohan's content takes me through The Wold. Here you can see my little red arrow pointing towards Langhold, my first destination.

As usual, the new LOTRO maps for Riders of Rohan are gorgeous. In fact, much of Eastern Rohan is quite beautiful. I spent my first hour or so wandering the early parts of The Wold, taking screens when the mood struck me.

Okay, once more, with feeling—wow. The Turbine Creative Studio deserves great thanks for these amazing Rohan pieces.

After I made googly eyes at every shiny piece of new in-game art, I decided it was high time to claim my War-steed. The town farthest north in The Wold, Langhold, was my first stop, and once there I spoke with its Thane, or leader.

Without giving too much away, the first town in Rohan, Langhold, faces dark times. There is a battle, and things get rough. Thankfully, soon after the events of Langhold I received my very first War-steed.

I had my choice of a Light, Medium, or Heavy War-steed. After careful thought involving a dart board and a blindfold, I opted for a Heavy War-steed.

I named him Pokey; it just felt right.

There is a Mounted Combat tutorial in-game that goes over aspects of the system, like building up Fury to enhance your attacks and heals, or queuing up an attack before you reach an enemy so you can focus on steering. I won't cover those basics here because, frankly, the LOTRO development team did a great job with the tutorial.

Before I could gallop off into battle with Wargs and Easterlings, I took an on-foot Draug detour, which was okay, because killing Draugs results in amazing death animations.

Playing a melee DPS class like the Champion made chopping through the grossly unpleasant Draugs a breeze; perhaps a breeze of acidic green blood, but still.

With the sinister Draug slain, it was time for Mounted Combat. Pokey and I rode into a vast field and the new (and quite useful) automatic quest feature tasked me with slaying a few Vicious Wold-Boars. With my trusty steed, Pokey, I defeated several of the deadly battle hogs without in record time. This speedy trend would continue as I stumbled onto more automatic quests.

Let's get to our first Mounted Combat tip, and take a look at the War-steed portrait:

Focus on the 10.3 below the horse head—this is my War-steed's current speed. Notice the red meter to the right, which is the Fury meter.

Let's look at another screenshot of my War-steed's portrait:

In this image you can see the War-steed's current speed is lower, and so is the red Fury meter. What you cannot see is that the Fury meter responds slower than the speed meter.

A Mounted Combat Tip: Always look at the speed number when adjusting for turn rate; the Fury meter is used to judge whether or not you want to expend an attack, and thus, your current total Fury.

War-steed Traits

When your War-steed levels up, you earn War-steed traits. I'll give a broad overview of the four areas of improvement you can invest Trait Points, but first let's take a glance at the in-game War-steed Trait panel:

The top row of icons represents basic War-steed stat improvements. These War-steed traits you can improve their Endurance, Power, Amour, Strength, and Agility.

The three columns each improve upon one area of a War-steed's combat focus: the red column focuses on offense traits, the blue column focuses on defense traits, and the yellow column focuses on maneuverability traits.

I chose to focus on a couple from the yellow column all about speed and maneuverability.

The first three traits give nice boosts to acceleration, maximum speed, and turn rate. The turn rate boost is what I was really after, but faster acceleration and top speed are quite nice, too.

As a Heavy War-steed user, my biggest weakness is the very area this line of traits improves—my ability to give and take damage was not in question.

Once I invested three points into each of these War-steed traits, I put one point into Endurance, four points into Agility, and five points into Strength. My reasoning for this is that basic stats contribute to several aspects of War-steed performance—and also, a little extra health never hurts.

My next investment went into the red offense focused War-steed traits:

Well Rounded is a great War-steed trait for my Champion, who loves to critical as much as possible, but Precision is a nice bonus in Mounted Combat because of its back-and-forth attacks; nothing is quite as annoying as when an enemy evades and costs you a full Fury meter and a skill cool-down.

That's it for this week! I promised to largely avoid spoilers, but I can say that with 26 War-steed traits and my War-steed's level around 17, I finished The Wold quests and am ready to ride southward.