Ride it Out: Black Desert Online Horse Skills Guide
When it comes to riding in Black Desert Online, one quickly understands that it is unlike anything else you may have encountered in other games. We assembled this Black Desert Online Horse Skills Guide to provide you with insight into the complexity of the process so you can learn how to master your horse and get the best results out of him!
Some of these skills will require a lot of patience and exercises and are a combination of in-game money investment as well as actual practice to perform them properly in the game (when you master drifting, for example, you will have an amazing fun time!).
In the majority of other MMO’s horses or other means of transportation demand little to no skill. World of Warcraft, for example, gives the player the ability to ride a ground mount and even fly after a certain level, but there is no actual skill involved in it. The ground horses and flying mounts know absolutely no inertia and will stop and change the direction in a blink of an eye. That is not the case in BDO, where a player needs to level a horse and then go on to acquire and level specific horse skills. Indeed, there is hardly a game that can get anywhere near Black Desert Online as far as its complicated and extensive riding system is concerned- and we haven’t even touched upon the subject of breeding horses yet!
Table of Contents
Getting Your First Horse
You can get your first horse in three different ways now (might increase in the future).
The first way is to simply buy the horse from stables. Current price is 15000 Silver (subject to change) for the slowest mount in the game, with the top speed of 94%.
A second way is to tame a horse. This involves a lot of preparations and money, knowledge and luck. It is possible that other players will be trying to tame the same horses, which will disappear for two hours if they are tamed by someone else. You will require about ten capturing ropes (just in case, as the saying goes) and a Lump of Raw Sugar, something you will have to make on your own. Once you capture the wild horse with the capturing rope, you will need to give him a lump of rock sugar to reduce the likelihood of the horse resisting your attempt to mount it.
The third way to get a horse is to simply wait and get a free one from your rewards.
Equipping Your Horse
Horses also have a small inventory where you can put some of the items that will improve their performance. There are overall five pieces of equipment slots we can put specific gear, each piece of gear boosting a specific feature of your horse.
- Saddle: it will increase endurance and stamina as well as the maximum HP
- Stirrups: stirrups make mounted combat possible
- Bard: increases armor of the horse
- Horseshoes: increase total galloping speed of the horse
- Feather: feather will increase the maximum HP
All the horses in Black Desert Online have a specific “tier.” You can capture and tame wild horses in the range of tier 1 to tier 3. In order to advance further than tier 3, you will have to engage in horse breeding. Eventually, you will be able to reach all the way up to tier 8, a tier in which the horses are having some incredible skills right from the moment they are born.
Best Skills for Horses
it is not easy to say what the best skills for horses in Black Desert Online are since different play styles ask for different skills, but there are always some skills that players will hardly be able to go on without.
Instant Acceleration
Instant acceleration is a little bit like a boost in the game, turn it on and witness a short speed up while running with the horse. While this skill significantly increases your traveling speed you still have to pay attention that your horse doesn’t get completely worn out, because activating the instant acceleration takes a big chunk of the horse’s stamina.
Drift
The drift skill is exactly what it sounds like; it allows the horse to slide and maneuver around people or objects in the game. Although it does not improve your speed, it certainly does give an additional maneuverability to your mounted character.
Sprint
Sprint allows the horse to instantly falls into a gallop, instead of starting out with a slow trot. Sprint works best when the combination with the instant acceleration and you will have a lightning fast horse that will get you anywhere in matters of seconds.
High Jump
As its obvious description says, high jump is a skill that will allow your horse to jump higher than before.
Streak Sump
Streak jump is the ability of the horse to perform a jump without actually stopping to do so.
Charge
This ability allows the horse to charge enemies in combat.
There is a number of other skills that can be acquired in Black Desert Online and which all apply to horses, such as quick boarding (the ability to get on your horse faster), caution (horse will stop before jumping off a cliff), sidestep (horse will step to the side) or quick back (horse will be riding faster when going backwards) as well as many others.
Breeding Horses
As mentioned before, you can get your horses all the way up to the tier 8 by practicing in-game breeding. You must keep in mind that there is a distinction between level and tier. You can level your horse from level 1 to 30, which is the max level for the horse, while its tier remains the same, which is set as the animal is born. A way to get a higher tier horse is two breed to lower tier animals and get a better offspring than their parents were.
Generally, it helps if the horses are higher-level when they are being bred. In order to breed horses you need to do the following:
- Get a male and a female horse
- Put both horses at the same stable
- Have an extra room in that stable for the young foal
- Ensure both horses with full stamina (if they are not, please use the recovery option in the stable or feed them carrots)
Here the things can get a little bit weird. You need to click on your horse and select register at the breeding market which will make this horse available for other players to breed their horses with as well. Essentially what you need to strive for is to find the best possible mate for one of your horses and breed with those. The chances are that you can just as well lose all the opportunities to really breed your horses and remain only with the option where you need to kill both parents, but instantly get an offspring. The higher we go with the tier list, then the less type of horses are available and harder it is to get them.
The Courser System
Coursers are tier 1 to 8 horses that have learned all the necessary skills and are very valuable when it comes to trading and breeding with them. If your horse has all the necessary skills it automatically qualifies as Courser, and you can recognize those in your lists by the golden icon in the mount menu. Breeding two Coursers will always yield a foal that starts off with two skills.
Finally, we come to the awakening part of the game related to horses. If you successfully awaken a tier 8 Courser, you will get a tier 9 horse. This horse is called Arduanatt the Pegasus and it has special abilities, one of them being his wings that allow him to glide from high altitudes and not take any fall damage when he lands. It also has these following skills, among others:
- The spirit of the Courser; it regenerates the HP and stamina when it’s “parked”
- “Double jump” enables the horse to, well, double jumps…
- “Charge this one” enables the enemy to charge twice consequently
Awakening can be a risky process that easily ends in a failure. In case the process does not succeed, you still get back your previous mount, but you will lose all the experience points that you have been built up to that point.
Leveling up horses and raising their tiers can be a very complicated and costly procedure in Black Desert Online, so make sure you know exactly what you are going after before you actually start investing money in specific training, taming or breeding exercises.
For more Black Desert Online, check this out: Picking the Right Fit: Black Desert Online Best Classes
