@San and imisshotmail, I agree to a certain extent, but you also have to take into consideration that 50% if not more of the maps on the NA1 rotation are city or village, often very closed in and are thus light cav unfriendly maps. This means that far less often your not in control of the encounter and thus subject to more vulnerabilities then advantages when engaged. Furthermore, range particularly on these maps have the ability to set up at unreachable places or "dead ends" often devastating you before or as you are being swarmed by the other team. Not so much of a problem for heavy cav as they generally can plow through mobs and take many projectiles (although maybe not with this new change).
This this this.
I consider myself one of the better cavalry lancers in NA1 (or just one of the better cavalry players), at least it seems this way whenever I get a chance to play during prime time. Lots of times I go 4, 5 or higher kills for every death on a map. But my overall K:D is 2.2:1
But then again, I don't do things to purposely pad my K:D, I've never cared about my overall K:D I play for the round and the map and my personal enjoyment. I don't leave when my team is losing, I don't leave when the map plays 3 city/enclosed maps in a row, I don't leave if I'm having a bad night. I think people's arguments that cavalry is automatically expected to be better than infantry, is false. But it is true like San said, you can typically pick your engagements more than infantry, so you can weigh risk vs reward a little better (at least on faster horses, if you are on a slow horse you still can get picked on by other cav). But lots of times like Jason says, you're playing a city map where you shouldn't even be riding around on a horse, so you really don't get to put that "choose your engagements" into affect. There's a lot of enclosed maps in the battle rotation, I'd wager far more city/enclosed maps than maps that have some openness to them.
San says the "glance won't rear horses", only affects the heavier horses (so lighter horses still get reared on a glance), so I stand by my sentiment that it was too drastic of a change to allow anything with polearm animation that has pierce stab, to rear a horse.
I think it would be a good idea to have lowered the length needed to rear from 140 to like 130 or 135 (I made a long post about this before, and showed the different length polearms in each category, not going to rehash it here). But not every single polearm animation with pierce stab to rear a horse, that was one hell of a drastic change. Especially here we find out that the trade off (no more rearing on glances) didn't even work for light horses (well it only works reliably on large warhorses and above...so even some of the lighter armored horses).