While Diablo 4 has many buffs coming to all its classes, especially Sorcerers and Barbarians, in about a week, it’s also getting some additional bonuses. Namely, some buffs to the game’s terrible horses which are a necessity for getting around but a giant pain to actually use in practice.
Blizzard has announced that a number of changes will be coming to horses:
- Horses will now be able to break through barriers when you use a charge, as opposed to you hitting one, getting off awkwardly, killing the barricade and enemies, then waiting for your cooldown to return.
- Horses will no longer get stuck on literally everything you encounter on the map as you ride them.
- Horses will no longer be on cooldown if you get off one to climb up or down a cliff.
I think Blizzard not only wants to improve the quality of life of horses for its own sake, but they want to make people more amenable to horses in order to sell more cosmetics. I maintain the entire game probably didn’t need horses at all if they just put in a few more fast travel points and upped base movement speed a bit, but here we are.
These are not the only problems with horses. The idea your horse “dies” when you get surrounded or hit by too many enemies is very annoying, because it dramatically increases the cooldown to something like 20 seconds. I am not precisely sure what this is supposed to be preventing, but if they have a reason for it, I’d like to hear it.
Then there’s just the horse cooldown in general, where if you get off you have a cooldown before you can get back on, even if you hop off by accident. I think this is mainly meant to prevent de-aggro-ing mobs when you do this, which is what getting on your horse does, as it’s why you’re not totally swarmed as you ride. So maybe this one stays.
I am curious as to when Diablo breaks the mold and starts offering other mounts besides horses as cosmetic microtransactions, as that seems somewhat inevitable at this point. You can already get like, elk antlers on your horse through armor, but I would not be surprised to see other types of animals or even demons as mounts at some point. I mean look at World of Warcraft and how much revenue that’s generated for them. But that may be a ways off yet, and we’ll start by making horses less terrible.
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