Today Turbine announced the fourth expansion to Lord of the Rings Online, named Riders of Rohan.  The expansion which will be released in the fall of 2012 and will bring with it a level cap increase, new locations, mounted combat and much more.  Executive Producer, Kate Paiz, stated that Riders of Rohan will be the largest expansion to date and will be twice as large as Rise of Isengard.

NEW FEATURES:

• Experience the Riders of Rohan – Join with the Rohirrim and ride across the sprawling Plains of Rohan; witness the breaking of the Fellowship at Amon Hen; forge alliances with the Ents of Fangorn; and aid Éomer, adopted son of Théoden, as he seeks to protect his homeland from the growing Shadow.

• Introducing Mounted Combat – Ride into Combat atop your loyal War-steed as you defend the people of Rohan from the forces of Isengard and Mordor. Customize your War-steed’s armor and level its skills over time to aid you in mounted defense of King Theoden’s lands. Mount your steed and gather your fellows to fight against Warbands, contingents of roving warg riders that have been scouted all over the Plains of Rohan! It falls to you to head off and defeat this new threat before they over take the land.
• Advance to level 85 – Continue your legend in the next chapter of The Lord of the Rings Online. Experience new adventures in the epic story, and gain new skills and deeds as you face new challenges on your journey to 85!

This is more or less a heads-up for people who haven’t checked their client or tried to log on today, but Patch 4.1 has indeed gone live! The files for the update round out to about 325 MBs, so it shouldn’t take long to download at all. If you’d like a more comprehensive look at everything this content patch has to offer, you can either click here or just scroll down the page a bit.

To those who have been living under a rock or just re-entered society from their decades-long hermitage and are still getting the hang of this whole “internet” business, Patch 4.1 does not include a new raid instance, PvP season, or tier of gear. While this is atypical for what we’ve come to expect from a content patch, we should see Patch 4.2 much sooner after this one than normal, and it should contain all of these things. In fact, I’d expect to see it in testing on the PTR within the next week or two.

For the time being, let’s all do our best to enjoy both “new,” arguably more challenging 5-man Level 85 Heroics, and handy UI features. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to log in and make sure that my guild still exists. And if it doesn’t, it looks like I’ll be giving an extensive report on just how well the Guild Finder works!

[Update 1] Patch day blues. Anecdotally, I experienced a lot of problems trying to enter one of the new instances through the Dungeon Finder and I know some friends had similar troubles. Officially, the first round of hotfixes has been applied. They certainly won’t resolve all current issues, but you can find the list of changes here.

[Update 2 -- April 27] Second round of hotfixes have been applied.

Cataclysm has brought on a lot of changes for rogues. Subtlety may again see the light of day as a PvE spec, Hunger for Blood is replaced by Vendetta, and weapon specializations taken away from Combat just to name a few changes. This post will help you determine what gear you will want to go after in the endgame, and what you should be looking for while leveling.

The first thing you want to keep in mind are what stats you are going to want for heroics and raiding. While this doesn’t matter much for questing, if you are leveling in dungeons or preparing to do heroics, you should start looking to build your set while you are leveling.

Stat Weightings

With reforging, you can move some of your gear’s stats around. It’s important to know what stats you are looking for and reforge the stats that aren’t very good for you into better ones.

For Combat, this is what you are looking at:

Agility >> Hit (pre yellow cap) >> Expertise (pre cap) > Haste > Hit > Crit > Mastery

Basically, agility is way better than everything else, hit is way better than other things until the yellow cap, then hit and haste are about equal, but both better than crit and mastery.

Your hit information can be obtained by going into your character stats sheet. At level 85, here are the caps assuming you picked up 3/3 precision:

• Yellow: 241 (2%)
• Spell: 1127 (11%)
• White: 2523 (21%)

Basically, hit rating is really good until the yellow cap, then its about as good as haste and expertise. It stays about that good up until the white hit cap, at which point it is useless. You won’t be anywhere near that number, so don’t worry about it too much. Expertise is capped at 781 for most races; if you have a racial that increases your expertise with your weapons (like Gnomes or Orcs), you are looking at 691.

A note on weapons: You are going to want a slow main hand and a fast offhand. The type of weapon doesn’t matter (unless you have a racial bonus), but the only fast offhands are daggers, so put a 1.4 speed dagger there.

Read on for the full list of gear you will want. Continue Reading

Just as I even thought to train First Aid at all, someone else already had reached the cap.

I know many of you have been chugging along for most of today, perhaps first attending a midnight launch event, then staying up odd hours and straining your eyes to keep them focused on the screen in front of you and the task at hand: Realm First achievements.

Yet so quickly after the race began, most of these achievements already have been snatched up by the quickest in the pack. All throughout today as I played at my own pace and to my heart’s content, I was surprised at the continual flash of “realm first” achievements flashing across the chat bar. On my server, the first realm first achievement I saw was Illustrious Miner — for leveling up the profession to 525 skill points. Followed by Illustrious Angler and Engineer.

I logged out for a short break, and came back for the start of the level 85 dings. First, it was a druid. 17 minutes later, a Pally and a Priest took their respective achievements only seconds apart. A few scant achievements may still remain, but the players aiming to get them certainly are already well on their way to earning some in-game respect.

So how do they do it? Well, one world-first European player — Athene, on his holy paladin Forscience — recorded a short video that glosses over all the work that went into his mere 5-hour journey to becoming the first character to reach level 85 — both his strategy and his motivations are discussed. As well as a promo for something else entirely. (warning — Some language may be NSFW)

Click through for the video and my take on the quickness with which these achievements are being … /ahem… achieved. Continue Reading