LOTRO

Turbine is ready to talk about the next Lord of the Rings Online expansion, Riders of Rohan. We've got a firsthand look at Riders of Rohan and LotRO in 2012. Check it out!

Lord of the Rings Online has been a solid game in the MMO market for five years now. A game that has supported its players, grown with some of the best expansions in the industry now has some major plans for 2012. Riders of Rohan will be the next expansion for LOTRO and this one brings loads of new content to the game as well as a new mechanic that will have everyone talking: mounted combat. What is Rohan without its war steeds and charging attacks? Thanks to Peter Jackson for making them look like bad ass vikings on horseback, the Riders of Rohan expansion brings another massive update to LOTRO, so let’s go down the list of what players can expect.

Read more of Garrett Fuller's Lord of the Rings Online: Bringing Riders of Rohan in 2012.

The full list of patch notes for The Lord of the Rings Online's Rise of Isengard expansion, which launches tomorrow, are now available.

The new expansion introduces three new regions (Dunland, Isengard, and Gap of Rohan) to the game replete with hundreds of new quests and deeds (including a new Book quest) and even bumps the level cap to 75. Players who make it to Isengard's endgame can look forward to a Tier 1 and Tier 2 raid against the dragon Dragioch, where they may be rewarded with new  second age Legendary Item rewards and raid-level crafting recipes.

The Lord of the Rings Online: Ries of Isengard is currently available for pre-purchase in three different configurations: Legendary, Heroic, and Base. The editions are priced at $49.99, $39.99, and $29.99 respectively. Find out more about what each edition offers here.

Folks with a creative bent will want to check out the new Lord of the Rings Online photo contest called "Have You Seen the White Hand of Saruman?"

Participants in the contest download Saruman's white hand and are asked to apply it in creative ways to a photo of their choice. Submissions are posted to the Lord of the Rings Online Facebook page.

Prizes include:

Read the fine print on the Lord of the Rings Online community site.

Turbine and the Lord of the Rings Online team have released six new screenshots from the upcoming Rise of Isengard expansion. The screens feature Saruman as well as several nice looking environment and battle screens. Check them out in our Lord of the Rings Online gallery.

A new developer post has cropped up on the Lord of the Rings Online site that addresses changes to itemization coming with the Rise of Isengard expansion. The team identified two main areas of concern and lays out exactly how those will be addressed and how the changes will affect all types of players.

Finesse and how it isn’t the new Radiance

Let me start off by saying that Finesse is not intended to be a replacement for Radiance. Finesse is a rating, not dissimilar from offense rating or critical strike rating. You will find it on quest gear, you will find it in instance loot, you will find it all over the place.

Radiance required you to grind for extremely specific loot in order to be effective in a raid space; we’re not going back to that world. The hope is that a player will be about at their maximum finesse efficiency by wearing roughly 3 pieces on-level with the space. So a raid player might walk into a raid wearing four rare quality items with finesse on them, but after gearing up in the raid cut down to three incomparable items with finesse on them. We’re also not requiring you to More >