Riding Lesson

The first thing you’ll notice when mounting your new warsteed, is that he or she does not ride the same way that your trusty travel mounts do. Warsteeds are bigger, heavier, and quite a bit faster than that Bay Pony you got from Hengstacer! Their momentum must be taken into account when you are riding them.

Not only will they have a much wider turning radius, they will also take a bit of distance to slow down and stop! Think about how a horse might turn, accelerate and decelerate in real life – it is similar in game.

To help you get around, and maneuver during combat, the developers have included a number of useful controls that you can use to steer your warsteed and we will talk about them below.

Getting Started

The first thing you may wish to look at is in the Mounted Combat options, which is located in the Options Panel > Combat Options tab. Towards the bottom there is a section for mounted combat with an option named War-steed Auto Slowdown. Enabling this option will cause your steed to automatically slow down and stop when you let go of the Forward Run key (Default [W], [Arrow Up]). This will cause the forward movement of your steed to be like your travel mount, excepting that the steed will not stop on a dime. Leaving this skill disabled will cause your steed to auto-run until you give it the command to slow down and/or stop.

Forward Movement

There are four different speeds available: Walk, Trot, Canter and Gallop. These speeds can be measured in Meters Per Second or MPS. The table below will show each base speed with no traiting or other enhancements.

Speed	Light Steed MPS	Medium Steed MPS	Heavy Steed MPS
Walk	6.0	5.8	5.5
Trot	8.4	6.1	7.7
Canter	9.6	9.2	8.8
Gallop	12.0	11.5	11.0

You may use the Run/Walk toggle key (default [Insert]) to set your maximum speeds. Press it to toggle through the 4 speeds above. Your chat window will show a message that indicates “Your war-steed will only <insert speed name>”, and your mount will go no faster than the speed you set until you toggle the option again.

While moving forward there are a few different methods you can use to stop your speed. You may hit the Backwards Movement key (default [S]) until your horse slows down and stops. Each single tap will slow your horse down one speed. You may also double-tap the [S] key to perform a Quick Stop, which causes your steed to slide to a stop rather quickly. Quick Stop is also available as a mounted skill which you can activate via your hotkey bar.

Turning

As mentioned above, turning your steed is going to be much different than turning your travel mount. Warsteeds have a much wider turning radius and you must take this into account in order to maneuver your steed during combat and through towns. The best way to learn this is to spend some extra time in the tourney field that you use to complete your war-steed tutorial in-game. This field is available to you both in and out of the tutorial instance, at Harwick in the Wold.

After you complete the tutorial quest, spend some more time running the short oval circuit at each speed, in both directions. This will accustom you to the basic turning abilities of your steed. Once you have done this a few times, run the paths of Harwick at the different speeds and try not to run into anything.

Take note that strafing (side to side movement) only really works from a stand still and the strafing keys have no effect during forward movement.

In Conclusion

Riding your warsteed is nothing like the travel mounts you are used to, but with a little practice you’ll be winning steed races and besting your foes in no time.