Lustmord wrote:Dear Devs,
Have you been following any of the big fights that occurred during this test? For anybody that doesn't know it for some reason, the trend right now are horses. Either lancers or horse archers. 90% of people were using one of these in any big or small fights in the MMO. I could live for now with archers using horses, because these horses can be an easy target for friendly archers and lancers, leaving enemy archers alone in field.
What I don't understand is why lancers on a dirt cheap warhorse are so OP right now? Why the warhorse without any armor has 2-3 more hp that any foot soldier? Why a horse without any kind of protection is not dead after a couple of good thrusts to it's throat or a heavy hit to it's legs? Why the lance damage is so high? Basically a lancer can kill anybody in 3 hits. To kill a warhorse you need 10-15 hits from a partisan. Why the warhorse is regenerating health faster that a god damn wolverine? Why the rider can get on horse instantly, without any progress bar or cast time, without any chance to interrupt it?
You can say that we can use traps against horses, but a lancer has to be either blind or stupid to step into them. You can say that we have pikes against them, but the pikes are trash since it immobilizes the user and can be viable only in a 1v1 situation A pikeman is a sweet cherry for any archer, melee or even a 2nd lancer that just charges his back. Shields won't help much here as well, you'll just die slower. From the whole arsenal, there are only polerams that can be somehow useful against horses. Considering the fantastic balance for polearms and weapons in general, we can throw out everything except Partisan and maybe Glaive. I wouldn't have a problem if all things I described would work only for heavy horses, that could have some logic since it's expensive, has metal armor, requires a lot of extra skillpoints and is slow. What I don't agree with, is that a class should be so much better than anything else in the game, has speed, damage, HP advantage over everything else.
This is not a topic where combat balance should be discussed. I suggest you to make dedicated topic, it will be popular. I made topic about the balance how infantry will be obsolete in the MMO 6 months ago (during the summer), but only few saw it for real until some guilds actually started using mounted fight tactics to wreck infantry heavy groups that the issues was acknowledged by many.
class-balance-in-field-battles-t19729/
First of all how can you consider horse archery less of a problem then lancers? Where is the logic for archer with 30 points on chivalry (to unlock mounted fight on 0) jump on a horse (or dismount) in a moment, have the same speed and same horse hp as lancer who has 90 points in mounted fighting mastery? Catching skilled horse archers with friendly lancers is possible only in someone's dreams. But that goes for skilled ones who for now are minority.
As for warhorses hp - it's the same reason players don't die from 1-2 hits. The heavy horse is only shock cavalry against infantry, the regular lancers on normal warhorses will wreck them without taking more then 1 hit.
We don't game with 1 hit kills, so we have to scale everything to silly levels - lancer will charge you 3 times instead of once for 1shot kill, his horse will die from few hits x3, when you dismount him he can magically jump back instead of breaking his bones and finishing his battle.
Other then that the mounted fight tactics were clear since the summer when we saw the MMO map - unlike YO it's mainly huge open places with no or only few trees. That's paradise for cavalry which was very rare in YO, you could always hide either in the forest or near the water. You wouldn't suggest that that cavalry shouldn't be the main fighting force when it comes to open field battles?
Partisan is broken enough, mainly it's hitbox range compared to the actual weapons lenght, but it's not for killing horses - long pike does that in 2 hits. Yes the pikeman is standing still, but that's more then normal with such insanely long weapon. It's a team fight - you need combination of all kind of troops to be successful, not only few. The proportion depends on the fighting location, can't be universal. You can't counter lancers with pikemens alone. You can do that with pikemens + own cavalry + archers/horse archers.
Also the horses are trend, because of the mobility it gives you (and the horses production is 1 of the main economical components for war needs) - the entire group moves faster, even the melee guys. They can ride around bumping enemy players and dismounted to fight as melee when the situation asks for it. Going with infantry only on open field battle against cavalry is like bringing a knife to a gunfight which is not a balance problem on it's own. But many of the stuff that make cavalry so much better then non-cavalry is a balance problem.
