The mounts in Diablo 4 are cool, I like them as an addition and am happy that they in the game.
That said, there are several design decisions that I disagree with, because they make using the mount clunky and unfun to use. I’ll point the issues below and offer a suggestion to fix the issue or offer an alternative.
- Mount cooldown is too long.
Whenever you need to dismount, for example to traverse terrain or because you got dismounted by mobs, it takes 10 seconds to get back on your mount. This is just an annoying hindrance, if you want to get from A to B as soon as possible, you are not going to detour or fight mobs frequently. The 10 second penalty just seems there to waste your time, instead of being an actual penalty.
Suggestion: Lower cooldown to 1 second, or 4 seconds if dismounted by combat.
- There are too many blokkades on the roads.
To build on point 1, having to dismount to clear a blokkade is annoying, but can add to immersion. The issue is that the blokkade gets cleared in 1-2 seconds, and then you’re still waiting on the mount cooldown. And this happens way too frequently.
Suggestion: Lower the amount of blokkades on the roads, and/or make them linked to dynamic events or other special occasions.
- Velocity and the dash feel clunky and counterintuitive.
The mount movement speed scales with cursor distance, which is an idea that sounds interesting on paper but just leads to frustration. For example, moving downward is annoying because your UI is in the way, slowing you down artificially.
Additionally, the dash feels… off. Sometimes it speeds you up by a lot, and sometimes barely at all. I haven’t quite figured out how it works, but it doesn’t feel good to use at all.
Suggestion: Have mount movement speed be fixed, and rework the dash to provide a substantial, short and fixed duration movement speed. This can be stackable, for a very high movement speed burst at once, or 3 moderate speed bursts spread out over time.
- Mounts feel too slow in towns.
If the movement speed can get reworked in accordance to point 3 (or in a similar way), allow mounts to move at max movespeed in towns, and allow the dash to be used as well.
Suggestion: unlock max movement speed for mounts on towns, and perhaps add a hotkey to toggle walk/run speed for mounts.
- The dismount combat ability feels too weak.
Not sure how this works for other classes, but the ability for the rogue is mostly cosmetic. It has a cool animation and a large AoE, but it does negligible damage and it’s generally the correct move to not use it all, because of the animation lock.
Suggestion: Substantially increase the damage the dismount ability does (making it scale more with attack power for example).
As said initially, the mounts are cool and I like them a lot. Hopefully, the Diablo 4 team can address some of these issues and improve the mounts in a future patch.