Actually, the bane of riders are the bats. Their sonic thingy will knock you off every time. In fact, all the flying creatures seem to be tough on riders. Half-orcs, on the other hand, seem to need several shots with their crossbows to get me now.

@Brian ‘Psychochild’ Green: Good point on the ol’ dismount-remount shuffle. It is a bit silly, and there’s such a simple elegant solution…

There does need to be a balance so that you can’t ride through an army unscathed to get to the other side, but where you can ride past an enemy or two (or even a ranged foe) and not have to sigh and use a speed power to get past the enemies nipping at your heels. I think it would be a tremendous improvement to give the bar a bit more durability so that it takes at least 3-5 hits to dismount you. And, let the bar regenerate if you’re not in combat without having to dismount and remount.

This. Exactly this. Now quickly man, get yourself a job on their design team and get these great ideas implemented!

“After gaining his horse once again, the brown wizard gritted his teeth and spurred his horse past two marauding wargs. Swift of hoof was his horse, and luck shined on him as the claws of the fell enemies merely grazed his mount. A short distance after the wargs gave up the chase, Radagast dismounted his horse then called again fresh to ride with full its vigour once again toward his goal.”

Part of my problem when starting LotRO was that I was used to WoW’s system. You horse up and in most cases you could run through relatively dangerous areas and probably come out the other side on your mount. There was always some danger, especially if you were more susceptible to critical hits.

At the core, though, I like the idea of the LotRO mount system. It’s nice that your ability to stay horsed is represented by a bar instead of seemingly a random event if you take damage. In practice, however, it feels exactly as you wrote there. It’s frustrating when you round a corner only to find a wandering monster there and it dismounts you in one swift stroke. Or, you ride over a stealthed almost trivial enemy and it does the same. The amount of “damage” done to the riding bar tends to be so massive that the bar is almost meaningless.

There does need to be a balance so that you can’t ride through an army unscathed to get to the other side, but where you can ride past an enemy or two (or even a ranged foe) and not have to sigh and use a speed power to get past the enemies nipping at your heels. I think it would be a tremendous improvement to give the bar a bit more durability so that it takes at least 3-5 hits to dismount you. And, let the bar regenerate if you’re not in combat without having to dismount and remount.

Also, with you being on a non-RP server, you will avoid most of the raised eyebrows in response to using a goat outside of Moria!

@Capn John: Having read Syncaine’s description of various Darkfall battles it would appear that that game has the mount system about right for PvP. I don’t know how their mounts interact with the PvE environment though. I think WoW is always problematic when you compare a mechanic that is used in both PvE and PvP: something that reduces inconvenience in PvE can often lead to the emergence of frustrating or overpowered game-play in PvP; it’s obviously the eternal struggle for balance that they will always have because their PvE and PvP systems are almost diametrically opposed to one another.

You’ll be less delighted to hear that these mounts are available mostly through long faction grinds (Wardens of Annuminas, Council of the North, Lossoth of Forochel, Galadhrim Elves).

If faction grinding is intolerable, the only other option is to finish all 15 books of the volume 1 epic story, at which point you will be rewarded with a sturdy mount. Since volume 1 contains some of the game’s most interesting content, this is something you’ll probably want to be doing anyway.