If you believe that PVE players use horses as tanks, then you don’t understand PVE players at all.
There are two reasons why PVE players like me are happy that horses have high health now:
- The horses’ AI is stupid and insists on getting in our way during a fight.
- The aggro algorithm is even more stupid and the enemies have a hard-on for attacking my horse instead of me. And even when I manage to get them to aggro me, as soon as they get bored, i.e. when I haven’t damaged them for a certain period of time, they go back to attacking my horse.
I wouldn’t mind horses being as fragile as they’re supposed to be, if the AI weren’t dumber than a sack of hammers.
Yes, there’s a problem for defense. No, it’s not the horse’s health. It’s, like I pointed out above, the AI.
So no, the horses don’t need a health nerf. The AI needs to get better.
Bingo. This is a typical PVP-side call for nerf: take an exaggerated claim based on the most extreme example you can find, generalize it as much as you can, and ask for the cheapest and broadest nerf you can get.
Yeah, you can get some really extreme outcomes if you’re willing to re-roll your thralls and pets to the point that would make anyone else burst a blood vessel.
We could ask Funcom nerf stuff based on those extremes. Or we could ask Funcom to get rid of so much pointless RNG.
Not that it matters. If enough people whine about this, Funcom will go for the cheapest possible solution and apply the nerf sledgehammer to the problem.
To be fair, that’s just the OP. @Kikigirl and @SpherisCore actually raised a couple of valid points. Kudos to them.
But everyone here who argued for the horse health nerf is arguing for the wrong solution to the underlying problems, which is exactly how we ended up with the hot mess of the game we have right now.
Horses are drawing thrall aggro? That’s an AI problem, not the horse health problem.
People are storing dragonpowder in their horses’ inventory? Ask yourself why that tactic is dominant in the first place. Maybe the problem isn’t the horse health, but rather the state of raiding in general.
Even if using horses to transport dragonpowder was the biggest problem, there’s more than one way to skin that cat. @Ulyssi proposed a better solution, by letting people grab stuff from enemy’s horses.