Cavalry Mode: its victories, its flaws, and its potential

[Maroon]

Gonna start here by repeating what Click said in his thread, so read the thread thoroughly before you post!

When 0.6.0 entered the scene, I have to tell you, the devs had me baffled. Cavalry coming back? This has to be the best thing ever! The week after that, I was nearly non-stop on the cav servers, along with lots of other players (until the point where either NKA or Dan said "Hey, you get cav exp faster on ragnarok."). Devs could be found on the servers nearly all the time, unleashing hell on us as nords, and simply not caring whether they died or not.
Then, I had to go away for a week, because of some real life stuff I had to attend. When I got back, all cavalry servers were deserted. Ever since, I have only seen three servers fill up. This made me realise that cav mode isn't quite as good as it could be. It's fun when there's a lot of players on, but it still lacks... something. I'm gonna try and find out here what that something is, and how it could be fixed.
As always, I will list stuff down below, starting of with what I think is keeping players away from cavalry mode.

1. Mounted exp. There has been a big conversation about it a while ago, found here, but I will summarize the points made here. When cav mode started out, a character had to have 1.5 million Mounted exp to get to the last tier, unlocking the really good horses out there. With the assist multiplier of 0.3 for Mounted exp, you had to convert 5 million assist exp to mounted in order to get there. This was steep, but doable. A little while later, however, this was increased to 3 million mounted exp, bringing the total assist exp needed  to a whopping 10 million. For reference, a standard character needs about 1 million exp (melee, ranged and mounted combined) to get to level 52. If you only use melee exp for that, that would mean converting 2 million assist exp. In other words, the exp needed to get to tier 5 cavalry is enough to level 5 characters up to level 52. This is one hell of an investment, leaving out the amount of gold you can get for 10 mil assist exp (which would be 2 mil gold), for very little gain.
   
   
2. Classes. With the original cavalry, there was a lined out cav class, just like infantry and archer, which specialised in fighting on horseback. It was proficient with swords, polearms, had decent armor, and some shielding. On foot, it was a toned down infantryman, but give the Knight a horse, and he could take down the entire Kingdom of the Nords. In the new cavalry mode, however, you play as a character specialised in fighting on foot, one way or another. Snipers on horseback are virtually useless, since horse archery skill is not existent, and with good reason. Infantry are decent on horseback, but some bad Polearm skills. Crossbowmen are changed into weaker versions in Infantry, since they can't use their crossbows well, and Pikemen will have to do without swords or decent armor. Against the strong mounted Nords you fight later on, these characters don't stand much of a chance.
   
   
3. Lances can't stab. Yes, this has been brought up plenty of times, but lances that can only couch are not very useful, and they are the only weapons given to us when we invest in the cavalry class. Most swords are more useful than your average lance, and not all basic classes have access to them.

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My question here is: Why can't we have a specialised mounted Nord-killing machine? Why do we have to grind 10 million assist exp to get at the last tier? It's not like Knights would clog up the standard, non-cav servers, since you can't spawn in horses over there. So, I think the following points would give cavalry servers some more action again.

1. Reintroduce the cavalry main class. Playing as a class made for cav mode will make cavalry much more enjoyable to play as. Instead of a mounted infantry class, you get something that was made, born for fighting on horseback.
   
2. Allow the cavalry class on infantry servers, but without horses. This allows people to level their cavalry characters some more, and while they won't be as efficient as other classes at fighting on foot, a cavalryman would still get some decent armor, one handed, shielding and polearm skill, if they were made similar to the old cavalry class.
   
3. Make lances stab again. For the love of god, lances are epic, and they need stabbing to be as awesome as they can be.
   
4. Make the road to tier 4 cav a long one, for example by keeping the current multiplier of 0.3.

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Now, I know there are some issues with this idea. Some might say it would only encourage kiting more, having people wait a long time before spawning, but I think that in the current situation this is worse than it would be with a cav class. At the moment, if (if) there is a full server waiting for one guy, and he's decent on horseback, he can make his way to the next spawn wave, if the team is not too far in the waves of cav mode yet. However, this would take him a long time, as he'll have trouble killing all those Nords with the decent horseback skills he has. However, if that one dude would be a Knight (or whatever tier 4 cav would be), he'd probably be quicker, since he's a lot better at killing those Nords than the guy from the current situation.

Phew, that was a long post. Hope you stayed with me this long. I might add some more improvements when I (or you, reader) can think of some more, but I'll leave it like this for now.
Thanks,
Maroon