Game Design Rework horses (mounts in general)

Rn horses are kinda forgotten mechanic bcs new raids dont even give u horses and most of the players either raid or lr most of the time and horses are disabled in BOTH gamemodes
that i suggest:
1:enabling horses for lootruns (not all archetypes have good movement and it will at least lower this issue)
2:adding more complex breeding mechanics maybe even different mount species (like maybe Pegasus or even something completely unrelated to horses)
3:new species maybe will be able to fly for a short time or climb on the walls very fast
4:maybe add some kind of food (what will drop from lootruns) to breed new species

Those changes could make lootruns more friendly for most of non-movement based archetypes and will at least make mounts useful

 

I think the main issue is just that horses suck. Horses also don't let you hit enemies (unless you have a very specific build), don't let you get loot chests, get stuck on terrain, can't go up steep slopes, and can't be buffed to fix any of those issues. Add on that almost every archetype either needs mana regen or walkspeed to be viable, and horses seldom are significantly better if they even manage to come out equal. Even for archetypes with pretty bad mobility, a lot of builds are still faster than a white horse, and without any of the issues I mentioned. And even then, fast travel will always be better and is pretty readily accessible.

I 100% support a mount rework, but I think they need a bigger rework than you're talking about to fix a lot of those issues.

 

horses are bork. the only real benefit they have at this point is that they don't cost mana. most classes have movement that outpaces horses; unsure abt assassin, but even warrior can fly faster than a horse (except for the whole mana concern). horses are old, very buggy, and if they ever get revamped it's not going to be in a way where really any of this is applicable.

consider that horses are made by using the crafting slots. they were implemented in *2013* and have not substantially changed since then*

Spoiler: asterisk

scanning the wiki's version history, we see this:

• horses are mentioned 14 times.
• horses were added oct. 30 2013, as part of 1.10. three days later they're mentioned in the context of some bug patching and being sold by the VIP town horse merchant.
• mid-january 2014 horses are patched to remove a clipping glitch.
• 1.12 (august 2014) adds in the zombie horse cloak.
• 1.14.1 (late august 2016) incidentally mentions horses while describing a change to soul points. a patch for 1.14.1 in mid-sept. 2016 patches an undescribed bug with dungeon merchant shop horses.
• mid-january 2017 a shadowpatch for 1.15.1 makes horses work in minecraft versions 1.9+.
• a patch for 1.16.1 end of nov. 2017 horses are patched to be a little smoother.
• patches for 1.17.1 fix the name of horse merchants, a wall-clip glitch, and ban horses in wars (jan-feb 2018).
• the last mention of horses is late march, 2018. it says, cryptically, 'issues with horses should now resolve themselves.'

so, basically, horses were added 11.5 years ago, they haven't been updated for 7 years, and basically every mention of horses in that 4.5 year period of active development is bug fixes.

these things are *old*. 1.17 added in discoveries and modern-ish dungeons, along with a bunch of map and quest tweaks; since then, updates have added profs, SE, completely redone gavel, added both raids and (formal) lootruns, plus the total class and ability revamp.

at this point, i'd imagine it'd be a lot easier for the team to redo horses from scratch.

 

Okay, so I actually have my own personal basic-level rework idea for horses:
When you get a new horse, it's a random color. The color is completely cosmetic and doesn't affect gameplay in any way. Some horse colors are rarer than others and there would be some way to reroll your horse's color to get a random different one.
You can level your horse up to level 10, at which point you can "prestige" it, increasing the max level by 10 but also resetting its level to 9 levels lower than whatever it was before. You can do this up to three times until the max horse level is 40.
So you can prestige at level 10 which resets its level to 1, prestige again at 20 which resets its level to 11, and prestige a third time at 30 which resets its level to 21, at which point you can now reach the ultimate max horse level of 40.
That is my idea for a fundamental basic rework to the way I think horses should work, or at the very least a rework to the dogwater-ass breeding system that needs to be fired into the sun.