I can’t find fault with what Cyryus said. The pros don’t really outweigh the cons. Having a horse, it is nothing more than a lawn gnome and gets ridden every once in a blue moon… so not much to speak of. The novelty and cool factor wears off. And instead of drawing attention to what Cyryus says, (Like I am to you)… allow people their opinion since this poll is where we are asked to give our Opinion.
Mom mode off…
The real question from the PvE perspective is, do they want to make a game that requires grouping with other players to complete content, or not? An alternative could be dynamically scaling content, but I seriously doubt their engine is even remotely capable of doing something like that (at least not in a way that couldn’t be exploited in PvP, given there are no real concepts of groups and there’s no instancing.)
Well like so many things about this game, it runs into the problem of trying to cater to too many, too diverse “groups”. All, as you say, without actually having a group dynamic or instancing.
That means that they have to either pick one playstyle as the “target”, and balance/build around that, which will potentially cause problems for others, or they have to try and create content that works for everybody, which is borderline impossible without scaling mechanics of some kind.
A case in point is some of the newer dungeons, that were supposedly created for groups of level 60 players. Something they received complaints about (unfairly IMO), but in the end it was a moot point as it’s entirely possible to do them as a solo player, as long as one brings a thrall.
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I think the goal would be to have followers that are smart enough to be helpful and survivable without being the beasts they are now, in a way that doesn’t require micromanaging their actions. To overcome boss challet would the be met with the capability to bring quantity instead of one high quality follower.
As in this thread, there are a lot of things to unblock before that really would work.
Well the road to “better AI” will be a long one to take…
I just watched my thrall yesterday fighting… Oh, boy. After a knock down, he always made a combo into nothing…
Then he stands and does nothing and the boss knocked him down again… Rinse & repeat.
Well I just watched a level 17 Berserker just run off the top of a mountain after a goat which I had just killed and it fell and he just seemed to sail off the mountain after it to his death at the bottom. I was just like wth no way. Walked down looted him and back to base to turn off game. Very frustrated at this very moment. God I wish they would fix all the thralls this is just getting worst. 6 hours of work down the tube because they can not get their crap together.
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Yeah, better AI would be great…
Some days ago I ran to a cliff and stopped 4m before. My thrall just passed me and fell down the hill… Only lost 2-3k health, as it wasnt that high.
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Let me guess, Skyfall Ridge? That place is as much Russian roulette for thralls as taking them into the Well of Skelos.
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I love to mount but i love to farm more. I spent 95% of my game full encumbrance, so taking a horse with me is a problem. If at least my horse could carry me over encumbered, maybe, i would use it more. I love the idea of horses, i don’t want to play the game without them, i love to have stable in my house and most of all i love to listen to them when i do my things inside my base. Even if the horse thing stays the way it is, i am ok with that. I wish however their role in my game was more practical. Thank you
Yup that it was, will not be taking a thrall there again.
I’ll admit, I’m finding WAY MORE utility for the horses after starting over on a fresh PvEC server. Once I’m 60, have maprooms everywhere, and build bases by obelisks, not so much. But the journey to that point, I am utilizing mounts a lot more than I thought I would. Shoot, just the fact that they help expedite the process of running around to get the obelisks in the first place is nice. Not to mention early exploration for certain journey steps, etc. But in the end game, I know it’s use will become much less than at the moment for me, and ultimately my steed will mostly be a decoration until they give us some more utility out of the horses.
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i wonder if there is any corelation between all that spit on horse usefulness & easely accessible fast travel x)
Perhaps. But as a console player (I actually versions for both the PC and the Xbox, but really only play games on my Xbox these days) I can attest that “driving” a horse is like getting behind the wheel of a car after you’ve downed half a bottle of vodka and smoked a blunt.
Public Disclaimer: Don’t drive drunk or stoned. And don’t try riding around on a horse using a controller.
Of course there is. But that is only the most minor side to this argument and hardly the point. Many of us prefer the map room travel to mount travel and it’d be another hit against the game for us if the solution is to remove one of these functions.
Sure if Map rooms went away, people would default to the next best thing. But that’s hardly good design practice and a real big middle finger to the players of the game.
Ultimately, to many of us, the comparison between map rooms and mounts is 100% pointless because map rooms are a core part of the game. Messing with that after all this time, when people are satisfied with them would be a terrible decision, and when we argue that mounts serve virtually no purpose and are a near pointless addition to the game, that is stated because another travel solution wasn’t needed, and the horses are counter productive in every other aspect of the game.
I guarantee if the solution to fix things is taking more away from the players, the general senses is not going to be positive. Saying ‘mounts are only useless because of map rooms’ in my mind is another argument for why the mounts shouldn’t have been a priority in the first place, not to remove map rooms.
If Funcom wants to give purpose to mounts and make it a meaningful addition, they need to be improved in other ways:
- Actually make mounted combat fun. Not the incredibly boring, button mash hacking that it is now. Open up other weapons as options. Provide mounted combos. Let archers actually shoot 180 degrees facing front and not handicap them to one side. Combat on horses is slow and boring. Factor in waiting for horse health to regen and its even more painful. Its a novelty at best, one of the most inefficient forms of fighting at worst. (not talking from a PvP perspective)
- Make farming on a mount logical. Provide a means of picking up loot without constantly having to mount, dismount, mount, dismount. Fighting on a horse is already slow enough. Splitting it all up with having to get off and on if you want to loot (this comes into play with harvesting wood and stone as well. That all said, I don’t expect to swing a pick axe or axe at stone and wood from the back of a horse. However, if mounts are supposed to fit with the rest of the game, this issue needs to be worked on).
- Carrying on with the theme of #2, let the Enc perk carry over to the horse. Or give the horse legitimate inventory space. Two main key assets of horses throughout human history is traveling and hauling… There’s already better traveling in the game and the horses are actually counter farming. They are designed contrary to how Humans have typically used them. The horse should help me with my farming, not completely hinder it. This is just backwards and weird.
- Allow interaction with other environmental things while on horse back. It makes absolutely no sense that we have to dismount to open a gate and then mount again to ride through. Then if you are on PvP and want the gate closed immediately, you have to dismount again… Almost everything about riding a horse is cumbersome.
- Make leveling up a horse more interesting, or just take the leveling part of it out of the game. Currently, the only real positive of leveling a horse is a greater stam pool. The rest of it is fluff that never really effects game play. The stats obtained are so underwhelming, that only Vit really shows any purpose.
- Make it so horses weren’t so handicapped while running. There is no real horse alive in the world that would go from a full gallop to a almost standstill because it accidentally touched a pebble with its hoof.
- Have horses actually be an aid in thralling… Not necessarily in knocking a thrall out, but at least in helping drag it back. If a thrall cant be drug back on horseback due to game limitations, like others have suggested, let us sling the knocked out thrall over the back of the horse.
- Make it so horses and thralls weren’t conflicting systems. The easy answer here is that the horses shouldn’t be followers. Design wise though, that may be a giant undertaking to reverse, however, it was a poor choice in the first place. As horses don’t replace thralls, do the same thing as thralls, can’t be traded with thralls for the same task, it makes 0 sense that they take up the same stance when it comes to restrictions for the player. I understand fighting on horseback while having a normal thrall in toe may be OP, nor is something I am asking for, however horses are crap for fighting, hauling, thralling, and just about anything and everything except for running around. If horses and thralls have to share the same restrictions, then at least make taking one over the other a reasonable trade off. The only thing horses excel at, running around, is not enough reason to take over a thrall unless the specific thing you want to do in game is, run around.
Map rooms are certainly not the problem. Horses that serve no purpose and have no connection with the game and the mechanics within the game are the problem. I am not advocating for their removal. They arn’t hurting anyone just standing in the corner as a fancy piece of deco.
However, their addition would be far far better served if the mounts actually facilitated game play. If it actually was incorporated into the game with a reason to actually get the horses and make use of them. This can be done without removing already long standing functions already in the game since the beginning.
Otherwise, leave them as just a fun side thing to do for when you get bored with the actual game and for most of us, they’ll just stand in a corner.
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Déjà vu! It’s almost as if people have brought up the removal of map rooms before and other people have replied what you just wrote…
All joking aside, there are times to take something away from the game and times to add new things. Mounts are not bad and they’re not useless, but their usefulness is limited to a certain slice of the playerbase. This is one of those times to add new things, because taking existing things away to force people to rely on mounts won’t make mounts more useful to those players.
If you serve your kids pork chops and spinach and they eat only steak, you might want to check out how you can make spinach taste better before telling them they won’t get anymore pork chops ever 
That just reflects the decision Funcom made to require “grouping” for most end-game content that means anything. At least in any practical sense. Even if you can manage to truly solo the Red Mother (or whatever), the fact that it’ll take you an hour to do it means the novelty of that solo experience will evaporate rather quickly.
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Well I can say the next best thing before a horse for me would be feet!!
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I find the horses to be useless for a number of reasons, but one of the biggest: riding ignores max encumbrance build. I can still walk and run around when overencumbered when I max the encumbrance stat but that benefit is eliminated when I mount a horse. Makes mounts useless to me.
Well maybe they will Nerf that next to make horses usable, have to be honest would not surprise me, Nerf or nothing instead of fix seems to be the order last few patches.
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The 5th perk will sooner or later be gone. Alex said he isnt a fan of it. I never used it myself, because I am to lazy to respec 
You have mules in the game… So I use them.
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