My problem with Mounts

So, I have to say that I'm thoroughly enjoying the new mount system (and the new expansion in general, I might add). The way training works now makes it more engaging as a system. Yes, it heavily incentivizes you to train in wide flat open fields but the old training system did the same thing anyways so I don't have a problem with it.

However, I do have one big problem with the new system.
Now, who can tell me what's wrong with this video?


Any guesses? So, at first I thought this was happening because I was actively picking up other things more, but I looked at my horse stats and, no, my Toughness is noticeably higher than every other stat and completely maxed out. I genuinely like the way mount training works now so it really irritates me that literally 90% of the pickups I see are exclusively Toughness, which I already have maxed out and still takes energy if you run into it. And another 5% are the blue Speed Boosts, which are mere temporary boosts that still drain energy on pickup.

The weird thing is, this doesn't seem to always happen. Sometimes it seems to actually give me other pickups somewhat generously, but I genuinely can't tell if I'm just getting lucky or if there's some other hidden mechanic; because even when that does happen, I still see an overwhelming majority of Toughness pickups no matter how high my Toughness stat is.

What on earth is going on with Toughness? This seems like a big oversight for an otherwise very fun and engaging system.
Now, you could choose any one of these many solutions to this problem, and all of them are very simple:

1. Massively reduce the frequency of Toughness pickups spawning.
2. Make it so that a pickup doesn't spawn if you're at its current max.
3. Make it so that you can't touch a pickup at all while you're at its current max.
4. Make it so that touching a pickup doesn't consume energy while you're at its current max.

These are all very simple solutions to a very irritating problem for a genuinely fun new mount system.
Anyways, what do you guys think of the new mount system or my solutions to this problem?

 

I've also noticed an overabundance of toughness powerups, and all the others seem like very nice QoL changes that I don't see much reason not to add. Fully support this post.

 

So, according to... someone (?), the way it works is that there are 4-5 pickups that are selected to repeatedly spawn and respawn, even if you dismount, and only get replaced if you pick them up. But that still begs the question of why I'm only getting toughness when it's my highest stat by a large margin and completely maxed out.

 

Toughness and Training spawn constantly for me.

My guess is that they're first in the list, and thus they're unintentionally weighted because it's only letting the ones later down the list spawn if the ones earlier in the list roll No

 

According to the mount info mega thread, if you don't pick up a boost it'll keep pushing that boost until you do, so if you aren't picking up toughness, it'll theoretically keep pushing it for you, by sort of bumping it up the priority queue. I'd guess what's happening is that it keeps spawning toughness boosts, and you ignore them since they're objectively bad for you to take, and so it keeps offering them to you because you didn't take them. Eventually it makes it so that this is the only one that spawns.

EDIT: As an actual response to your proposals, I think that making it so that you can't be offered pickups for a stat that is currently maxed is probably the best; it rewards you for maxing a stat instead of punishing you by decreasing the number of usable drops.

 

When on my Wyvern, it was Boost, Toughness, Speed Boost. A couple of days ago on my most beloved horse, it was only Elevation.

 

there is a list of powerups that spawn around you, one will only be replaced by a random new one when a current powerup is taken.
If you try to avoid specific powerups they won't be replaced by new ones and pile up eventually.

 

I've done a bit of testing and found that having a sacrificial mount makes the process way smoother. Get a mount that you aren't actively trying to level and use it to pick up everything except whatever you're trying to level right now.

I'm not sure if I like this or not; it makes it really annoying to level a mount if you don't have a second one to eat the bad pickups, but it also means that if you do that, you can power level a single stat much faster than if you just ran around and selected the one you want with all stats spawning evenly. If you're trying to level everything except for one stat though, it's kind of a massive pain. I still think that not offering things you currently have at the limit is the best option.

 

I think it's worth mentioning that I was actually overwhelmingly generous in my admittedly light criticism of the new mount system. In reality, mounts have a big ton of problems now that I'd not noticed because I already had a white horse. However, upon trying to make a perfect black horse for my friend in preparation for his joining of Wynncraft, I had to go through the absolute psychological torture of buying, training, and breeding a brand new mount of a specific color choice that I want.

Frankly I might make another post listing every problem I have with the system with my newfound perspective and ways it could be improved. Because as it currently stands there are problems that range from simply inconvenient to outright unacceptable. For example. it takes SIX HOURS to feed your mount one single item. That is completely unequivocally unacceptable.

 

Yeah, I think my exact words when I first saw it and was describing it to a friend were "the best profession". It feels like they set about making it as a grindy as reasonably possible and there definitely feels like a bit of a "buy VIP+ or better to make it faster" angle for breeding anything higher than a black horse equivalent. I get that they want to make high potential mounts something valuable and kind of difficult to get, but they still suffer from the same problem of lower level mounts being worse than just walking a lot of the time, and getting to a decent mount takes much longer because of the feeding aspect. At least as mage with decent mana sustain, I don't think there's any value to a mount with below somewhere in the neighborhood 100ish speed. It's just slower than what I was already doing. Getting to 100 speed takes, assuming min-maxxing and being able to always have food in (which is easier if you pay for Silverbull!), a week or two if you're unranked (way less if you buy a rank though!), and several hours of riding your mount in circles looking for the right power-up. I don't think that that's super unreasonable; I think mounts are meant to be a longer term time-investment where you slowly get a better one, but the problem is that getting one that's actually worth using takes too long. I wouldn't mind slowly leveling or improving a mount that was already worth using, but when it's a massive downgrade to my mobility, the only reason I'd be using it is to grind it up to the point where it's actually usable, which is unsatisfying.

 

My problem with feeding is that we already have a system in place that limits horse training: manual labor. In order to feed your horse, you need something to feed it to begin with. You either gather profession materials yourself (which of course requires partaking in professions), buy them on the trade market with your hard-earned cash, or you get them from raids (which are an endgame activity that themselves cost something to even attempt).

So why do we need any wait time at all, let alone 6 hours? It's like they're actively trying to make horse management as torturous and unfeasible as physically possible, to the point that it somehow manages to be even worse than it was before Fruma.

To me though the worst part of it all is the painfully disingenuous, borderline corporate-level excuse they gave for it; that they did it "not to make the grind annoying", but to keep continuous management from being the best strategy... even though their apparent "solution" of having a 6 hour wait time literally makes continuous management more necessary to constantly manage your horse because you genuinely feel like you're wasting time if you don't hop on Wynncraft the singular moment those 6 hours are up.