What weapon, armour and horse are you using? What's the upkeep on all that?
Large Warhorse, Mail Shirt, Mail Mittens, Splinted Leather Greaves over Mail, Nordic Fighter Helmet, Heavy Lance, Elite Cavalry Shield, Quarter Staff. If you think that's too expensive then I can inform you that I had a lancer alt before making my main one. It was a terrible 18/15 build with horse archery, power throw and other shit skills and I used a rouncey or a destrier with light leather or light mail. I could still easily top the scoreboard. Why? Well, most of the time when I end a round alive as cav I have most, if not all of my health left, and that makes heavy gear often pretty useless. If you don't do risks you can still kill tons and assist your teammates along the way whatever shit gear you use (except maybe the sumpter, I can accept bad cavalry performances from a sumpter horse
)
I'm not going to nit pick and deconstruct your entire post into little segments, especially since most of it is just your silly opinions, but there are a few key points I'd like to contest:
Using a top player as an example of how well a class is balanced is just stupid.
Your hypothetical is completely irrelevant to a realistic discussion of balance. A perfect player that never makes any mistakes could do really well as cavalry - but at the same time, they would do well with ANY class. Rohypnol switching to a horse-crossbowman is a great example of this. It's a class that's never been considered to be that effective, and still isn't for the vast majority of players. However, because he's a skilled player he was able to make it work. Likewise, your personal success as cavalry is probably more a result of your own level of skill than of the inherent effectiveness of the class.
As things are now, a few top players are able to do very well as cavalry, and everyone else is helpless. Highly skilled players can kill dozens of enemies with ease, to the point that it's almost not even fun to do any more. Meanwhile, average players are 1hko'd over and over and have nothing to show for it but a huge repair bill. Normally I'd be in favor of this kind of skill gap, but in this instance I think that it's too extreme. It's just not a good way to make the game fun. By increasing durability, you widen the margin of error for cavalry and allow newer players do to a little better. By decreasing speed/charge/maneuver, you make older players less overwhelmingly powerful. Skilled cavalry players would still be able to beat out unskilled players, but not by such a ridiculously wide margin.
I think that people's frustrations with cavalry stem primarily from this good player vs bad player dichotomy. If you want to make people happy, the class has to be balanced for both.
Also, as a bit of an aside, making the changes that I'm advocating here would also make it so that the riding skill would actually be valuable outside of fulfilling difficulty requirements. People could still have handling comparable to what we have now, but they would actually have to invest some points beyond the bare minimum. It would open up a subset of pure cavalry vs all of the hybrid cavalry that we have now.
Are you really stating that bad players can do well with other classes but not as cav? It's as cavalry the bad players really have a chance to make a difference if they have some basic awareness and decision making, even if they're bad at so many other sides of warband's combat. You have a class that is
able to pick his every fight, able to one-hit kill with an unblockable attack, able to outreach most weapons in the game and flee from uncomfortable situations at any give time, and that's not good enough to weigh up for its con, the repair bill? You could also call being one-hit a lot of the time a con, but speed-bonus is a double-edged sword, both a pro and a con depending on how you use it. That you do bad as cav because you're playing reckless should not be decisive for the balance. I've never stated that cavalry is overpowered, it isn't, but stating that it's the hardest class for bad players to play is just bullshit, sorry. I've seen players being hopeless on foot but still being a huge danger on horseback because of the nature of the cavalry class and what one can make out of its pros.
Btw gurnisson, if I only count my good rounds I probably reach skyhigh k/d too. But as a cav you also have to fight on maps which are impossible to play with your horses, or against players that aren't complete noobs or have eyes and ears, or brains. Killing 50 peasants is easy, killing anyone in a group of decent 2h is only possible if you bore them to death.
Well, I've counted all rounds since reaching level 30, and yes, that includes the bad ones. I only drop my horse in a few maps that makes it almost impossible to be at horseback, where I rather go with a pike. I've killed tons of good players, even the best ones are not aware at any given time and as a lancer, you should be there in a flash if you see behavior that makes you think that his focus is elsewhere. I would never hunt a peasant, that's just wrong and just wasting time. As a cavalry player being busy with low priority target to boost your kills is a joke of a decision, when you're a game changer while hunting high priority targets. As for peasants, I stab the ones that move in the path I'm travelling, that's it.
In a group of decent 2Hs? Wait till they engage someone and gets too busy looking out for their backs, or you can use maneuver and timing to outreach them with your heavy lance (if you don't use a heavy one, then it gets harder, I agree
)
Cav is the weakest class for 1v1 combat and that is final. It is autofucked by half the playerbase (poles and 2h that know how to use their wasd cluster), autofucked by most of the active archers and all throwers and of course you don't really stand a chance against HA or HX that aim for the horse. The only guys you have fair chances against in a duel are other melee cavs or 1h in wheelchairs (wearing heavy armor + str build)
No, it's not final. 1H cav and 2H cav is pretty bad for this, I can certainly agree on that part. Shielders are pretty easy prey for those to classes though with the nature of the bump-slash, but going for a 2H or a polearmer with 1H cav or 2H cav is certainly dangerous, and way too risky for my playstyle (at least most of the time
)
As for being a lancer, I keep away from people with long awlpike or longer weapons (though I wouldn't attack a 2H or another polearmer head on in the start of a EU1 round, that's too risky, it's more of an end-game playstyle but it's not that hard..) I would say you're at an advantage against a shielder and definitely against crossbowmen, but if you're going by people of the same skill-level I guess you can say that you're at a disadvantage vs. greatsword users and the users of long polearms.
Cavalry is not op, but can't agree with the people making it look like a bad class which is harder than the others (which it isn't close to being)
