Rick “Sapience” Heaton announced today that the NDA agreement has been lifted from the Riders of Rohan Beta:
Official Discussion: Beta Tester Impressions of Riders of Rohan
Today we have officially released Riders of Rohan beta testers from their NDA. Beta testing will continue as we move towards our new release date of October 15th. In the meantime, those Beta testers who wish to share their thoughts and experiences thus far with the general community are encouraged to do so here.
Feel free to ask them questions and Beta testers should feel free to answer.
You can ask questions of the Beta testers in the “Impressions” Thread, in the comments below, or really in any of the LOTRO Forums.
August 22, 2012 at 11:47 am
The only thing I want to know is how good is the new improve bubble legacy for minis.
August 22, 2012 at 12:28 pm
Think it’s 10%. Although I only popped my head into beta, prefering to wait for full release.
August 22, 2012 at 4:16 pm
The heal for the Gift bubble has also been reduced.
August 22, 2012 at 11:54 am
Was there any instance included in the Beta? Or what was the “endgame” during beta? If you reached max level was it only some daily grind on horse back or something interesting to do?
August 22, 2012 at 12:00 pm
The endgame for RoR upon release is going to consist of rebuilding the destroyed town of Hytbold. However Sapience has stated that they are still aiming to release the instance cluster before the end of the year, and with the deadline now set back there won’t be much time between then and the next update.
I’ll note though that Hytbold is currently not implemented in Beta, so I can’t say how good it is.
August 22, 2012 at 12:07 pm
Ah ok – thanks for your response! So in the current beta test was “only” the leveling part then, the new war horses/quests and the class changes?
August 22, 2012 at 12:14 pm
The past few builds have been mostly to test levelling content and related stuff, yes. They have been autolevelling people for the Moors recently, but now we should have plenty of time to test the mechanic!
Needless to say when the endgame stuff is released on BR, you guys will be hearing about it.
August 22, 2012 at 12:03 pm
It’s hard to say. A lot of the beta content was in a sad state of affairs. I can totally understand why they chose to delay the launch.
The quests that were up in the region were fun, but very much similar to what we’ve seen already (of course which MMO quests aren’t?). One nice thing was that area specific quest chains were accessible without going back to a quest giver. For example in the first area you are given a quest to kill ‘X’ amount of lizards. While you are out doing this, the “boss” lizard quest bubble pops up and you can accept it right then and there. No more having to kill all 10, then go back and pickup the boss quest.
The mounted combat is unique and I personally enjoyed it to no end. It’s hard to adjust to and frustrating at first, but when you get it down it’s a blast.
The music in the area is wonderful, top notch.
One of the instances REALLY made you feel your mortality, especially those of the squishier classes. It actually made you plan out strategy or else keep getting killed. I really hope they don’t tune it down, as it was one of the more heart racing moments I had in the new area.
I miss my War Steed already :\
August 22, 2012 at 12:17 pm
A suggestion, please.
When describing your impressions of the beta, please also include the class you played in beta.
Thank you.
August 22, 2012 at 12:27 pm
I played an explorer class, meaning all I did was explore. Didn’t play any of the quest lines. I’m kind of sorry I even did that much now, since I’m already familiar with the landscape before it’s even released. But when the invitation is there it’s hard to resist. And to anyone with doubts about the size and “epicness” of the region, you can put those to rest. You can even see Edoras in the distance from the river on the eastern border.
August 22, 2012 at 12:28 pm
…make that the OTHER eastern border.
August 22, 2012 at 1:32 pm
Any info about crafting?
August 22, 2012 at 2:04 pm
Oak is the wood and “riddermark” is the ore.
There isn’t much to report; It pretty much mimics westfold, and it appears they are continuing the trend of not providing a complete set of items for the various levels.
As a woodworker, I’m not sure I was even auto-granted a single weapon recipe. I know I was auto-granted a recipe for a captain’s horn.
I didn’t really get a chance to test crafting that much.
August 22, 2012 at 3:37 pm
Scholar Nodes are hard to come by!!!
August 22, 2012 at 6:36 pm
I saw plenty of nodes early in the Wold, before you even get to first town. Of course during early landrush you’ll be lucky getting to them before others do (sort of like when everyone was grabbing them all in bonevales). And some were around in Easterling’s camp (not so great if you want to harvest them on lower level alts w/o combat though).
August 22, 2012 at 1:33 pm
I am so glad we can talk about the beta now. Mounted combat seems to be really fun or really awful depending on who you talk with. It really varies by class.
August 22, 2012 at 3:39 pm
It “should” be fun… but for me it was very laggy and too much rubberbanding.. I don’t know if it’s my system or what…
August 24, 2012 at 6:28 pm
What are the limitations (area based / PvMP)?
August 22, 2012 at 1:40 pm
Crafting seems to be the usual deal, some decent teal gear from your guild hall. Tailors can make 2nd age light & medium horse bridles so that is going to be a good way to make some gold.
August 22, 2012 at 2:58 pm
One thing that helped me with mounted combat was that my character was broken and I couldn’t get past the “mounted combat training” for a while. Which meant I had to keep doing that instance over and over
Practice makes perfect.
Once I was done, my level 79 Warden was hell on wheels. The only thing that was rough, is I don’t have a lot of Fate traited on my ward, and mounted combat sucks up the power.
Also, a huge PITA was mounting and dismounting your war steed caused your stance to reset. As a Warden that normally runs around in determination I died a few times from not realizing this fast enough.
August 22, 2012 at 3:06 pm
When you get your Warsteed, you’ll want to dump some points into its Agility trait. This will help your mount make tighter turns when running at full speed.
August 22, 2012 at 3:16 pm
It will take 60,000 points to get Grand Master of the Guild on the new crafting tier.
August 22, 2012 at 5:24 pm
Great – that’s 6 large and 8 medium Westfold items; easily doable before the 15th.
August 22, 2012 at 5:03 pm
mounted combat (for RKs), they have something that looks like Shocking Words (damage regardless of stance), Prelude to Hope (HoT regardless of stance), Debate (think it was a buff dependent on stance), and 2/3 more that I forgot
and the stances for Rune-Keeper are Lightning (yellow), Fire (red) and Healing (blue)
stances for warden (in build 1 at least) were tanking (blue), Ranged (yellow), Melee (red)
pretty sure it defaults to red for everyone when you mount
August 22, 2012 at 5:05 pm
I didn’t get a chance to play a captain/Lore-Master, how were pets manages/deleted?
August 22, 2012 at 6:41 pm
No pets while mounted. On the other hand the Captain hits things very hard, and the lore master gets to throw large flaming embers from a moving horse that looks very cool.
August 22, 2012 at 8:22 pm
Did anyone play a burg?
August 22, 2012 at 8:23 pm
With mounted combat I mean
August 22, 2012 at 8:36 pm
I’m am hoping it still needs some fine tuning of the environment and the war steed. On my system what ran smooth in the old maps become really jittery in the new areas. The whole Wold map is covered in field foliage that I could not turn off. The area reminded me of the Lowlands but with foliage covering the ground. Looks great but I could not find a way to turn this off. If it can’t those with lower end systems may need to consider it time to upgrade some equipment. I’ve been running this game on a Intel Duo 2 4300 w/ Geforce 8800GTS. Oh and get your Agility up for the War Steed. You really need to make tight turns to line up w/ your opponents.
August 22, 2012 at 9:04 pm
disable frill. turns the extra grass off which seemed to be too much for the game engine to handle.
August 22, 2012 at 8:42 pm
Well, since no one else mentioned it: Hooray for the new Mac Native Client!
I was given my closed beta invite back in ’07 by a Mac user that couldn’t participate. Five years was a long time to wait, but at least it actually happened.
August 22, 2012 at 11:39 pm
I have some screenshots of the Captain mounted skills which I’ll be posting before long. Let me tell you that us Cappies hit like Mack trucks when mounted. And the pace of combat on horseback is FAST!
August 23, 2012 at 6:22 am
Auto Looting… yes, yes. Although I hope they change the sound it makes.
I had a difficult time with mounted combat, I even named my horse “WhoaDammit”.
You all have time to learn to play using the WSAD and Insert keys since that appears to be the ONLY way allowed so far.
I use a speed pad and mouse and the mounted combat experience was the opposite of heavenly, my keyboard isn’t even within reach most of the time so I have to rework my whole desk area in order to use the war steed as well as learn how to use buttons to steer the thing.
To be fair this and many other things are changeable so I hope they listen closely to all the feed back (I wasn’t the only voice saying MC was impossible) and that this delay will improve things with RoR because I really want to like this expansion, I REALLY DO!
I thought I took some picture but can’t find them… pickles… I know I got shots of the Argonath at least!
Visually, Rohan is stunning and I sure hope they bring out some of the NPC style hair and clothes.
August 23, 2012 at 7:32 am
Best moment for me in BETA, standing atop Amon Hen wearing my chicken mask.
August 23, 2012 at 9:00 am
Gaming keypad (g13) and mouse were my best options for mounted controls and Binky became more like the horse of death although even then there were a lot of unpleasant moments. Insert didnt seem to do much for me other than making my hobbit walk after being knocked off. Something like a 360 controller might work but not fiddled with that yet.
My 2 main hopes for the extra time are for the inductions on stances like warspeech to be reduced or standardised across all classes unless they sort the whole stance removal thing.
And the other would be allowing ranged “caster types” to have more than a tiny frontal cone for targetting mobs.
Visually the game is looking great and as we’ve heard the musics really good.
Some audio needs new sliders in the options as it can seem a bit OTT at times, same as with all new additions we should have an off option should our PC or ears not cope with them.
Funniest moment was being sent by an npc I’d just met for a swim towards the top of the falls by the argonath. Guess he wasnt keen on making friends with strangers!
August 23, 2012 at 1:22 pm
I’ve had a Beta key for a while, but only recently applied it. Did they close the beta server or are there still going to be additional tests?
August 23, 2012 at 6:38 pm
Feels so good to be able to not worry about talking about beta anymore
Round 4 will start next week.
August 24, 2012 at 9:30 pm
The epic quest line is simply lovely and by far my favorite part of the beta experience so far (though the auto-leveling and rep bestowal for chars was kinda fun, like hitting lucky numbers on a slot machine)! The music in the first session play made me think, for the first time ever, about looking up a game soundtrack. : >
August 25, 2012 at 9:23 pm
Any news on burglar mounted combat?
August 30, 2012 at 1:42 am
What are the MC weapon types? Any Lances???