Would have taken video, but from some reason ShadowPlay doesn’t seem to function with Conan Exiles.
Anyhow - I feel that kiting a group of enemies with a mount and a spear is easier than ideal as it is. The above screenshot is from New Asagarth, where with a pike and a mount I’ve easily taken out the whole village with very little risk, never died at it, the horse never lost even half of its health. I’ve also used this same tactic to solo legendary creatures with very little risk at mid levels with ordinary steel gear.
There are several factors that make this very easy and very low-risk:
- Attacking while mounted takes no stamina
- You can easily hit multiple opponents with one attack - just slide your aim over the enemies as you strike
- The 2nd spear/pike attack while mounted is always bleed, so you can quickly stack a lot of bleed on a group of enemies
- If you get dismounted, you can simply run away on foot. Even if the horse gets stuck in a group of enemies, they will stop attacking it once you’re outside the AI radius. The enemy is almost always so clustered that they can’t attack you effectively enough to actually kill you.
- The AI doesn’t know how to handle mounted enemies. They just blindly take the shortest path to you, which means that when you’re circling around them, they will all pack together making it easy to connect with your attacks.
Implementing a simple fix for just one point of these would probably not be enough. If it took stamina from the player when they attacked while mounted, that would just mean that it took slightly longer to kill the enemies. If the AI tried to intercept the mount or sought e.g. cover behind shielded allies, then you could still just safely stab at them from max range with no fear of being dismounted due to having full stamina at all times.
Multiple solutions would be needed in my opinion. Personally, I would like to see attacking while mounted take player stamina (as opposed to horse stamina, which is depleted when running) and there being a risk of falling off from an attack once you’re at 0 stamina. Then, in addition to that, I’d like to see the AI behave slightly smarter against horses. For example, they shouldn’t try to swing at a horse that is running past them too fast for them to have a chance at connecting. They should also seek cover from their shield-bearing allies when they are up against a mounted player and/or not give as much chase as they now do.
Thanks for considering!