Horses in Paladins

Horses are a fairly significant part of Paladins’s gameplay. When you spawn, you’ll be on a horse. Unless, of course, you have the Primal Prowler skin equipped which will grant you a sabretooth tiger as a steed instead. No matter the species of your steed, it’ll grant you increased movement speed, and you’ll only dismount if you are either attacking or being attacked.

If you find your horse too slow, the item Master Riding can serve to boost the speed of your steed. The trade off is that with the purchase of Master Riding, you cannot buy Morale Boost, which increases your Ultimate charge rate, Nimble, which increases your base movement speed, and Chronos, which reduces the cooldown of all your abilities. So far, the only scenario where I’ll definitely buy Master Riding is when I play Barik, so that I can rush to the point first to set up my turrets there before the enemy team arrives.

And so, what are the horses for?

The horses are great for keeping the games exciting. The typical gameplay loop is spawn, get to objective, fight, die, repeat. Getting to the objective is an absolute chore, especially if your character has low mobility. Thus, the horses serve to reduce the time taken to get to where you need to go so that you can get to the fun parts faster.

Not to mention, horses are actually rather good for teamwork.

Not only does every champion have different movement speeds, they also have different degrees of mobility. Thus, especially for larger maps, the slower champions will fall behind and the faster champions will just rush ahead. This causes uncoordinated teams to just split up. With all the champions having equal amounts of mobility when they spawn, this allows the team to stick together with more ease. In theory, anyway. We all know those people that’ll just run off into a flank route despite being a tank, leaving one glass cannon DPS and a healer to hold the point against the whole enemy team.

Aside from that, horses add a new layer of strategy. Knocking people of horses early means that you can delay the enemy onslaught and stagger their arrival, giving your team an advantage. There was a period of time where aggressive Kinessa mines for dismounting enemies at spawn were extremely popular, because they are small, disposable, easily hidden in bushes, and deals damage to anyone within a certain radius. Sure, the DPS is small, but you don’t need much damage to knock someone off their steed, and they can’t remount unless they die and respawn. A more harassment-based flanker playstyle can also fire a few shots to knock someone down while they’re still far from the objective.

While horses are a rather small part of Paladins’s gameplay, they are far from insignificant. They help to keep the gameplay exciting and makes teamwork a tad bit more possible. Not to mention, they add a lot to the fantasy theme of the game. They make me wish that Paladins can allow us to mod the game so that we can have a proper arena and gamemode for Terminus jousting matches.