Mounts and pets
Both are learned rather than carried: a mount or a pet you have unlocked belongs to the account, so every character on your key can call it, subject to the level it asks for.
Getting a mount
A mount reaches you as an ordinary item. It can be sold, traded or given away like any other, and it is only worth something to you the moment you use it: using it learns the mount onto your account and consumes the item.
They come from four places: bought from the mount merchants scattered through the world, dropped by creatures, handed over as a quest reward, or given out at an event. There are 240 of them.
Learning one is not final. The forget button in the mount window hands the item straight back to your inventory and removes the mount from your account, so a mount you no longer want is a mount you can still sell.
Riding one
The Individual Mount ability on your radial menu opens the mount window, which lists every mount your account knows and greys out the ones your character is not high enough for. Put the one you want on your quickbar from there; that is the ability that actually summons it.
Mounting takes 1.6 seconds, doubled to 3.2 in combat, and you cannot move or act while the bar runs. The attempt is refused outright while you are dead or in the Fugue, polymorphed, wearing an event appearance a DM gave you, under an effect that disables you, in a conversation, or in an area where mounts are not allowed.
You are put back on your feet automatically when you die, when you walk into an area that forbids mounts, and when a battleground turns them off. You also have to dismount before you can level up.
Mounted Combat is not optional
This is the part worth reading twice, because nothing in the game says it out loud: without the Mounted Combat feat you get none of your mount's bonuses at all. Not a reduced version - none. What you get instead is a flat penalty:
| Without Mounted Combat | With it | |
|---|---|---|
| The mount's AC, attack and speed bonuses | not applied | applied |
| Attack bonus | -2 | the mount's own modifier |
| Armour class | -2 | a Ride-based bonus, plus the mount's own |
| Spell failure | 30% | the mount's own, reduced by your Ride |
| Skill penalty | the worst grade, as if on a tier 1 mount | the mount's own grade |
So a colossal mount ridden without the feat is worse than no mount at all.
What riding changes
Attack. With a ranged weapon in hand you take -4 to attack, reduced to -2 by Mounted Archery. Mounts of their own add between 0 and +3, and that sits under the ordinary +20 attack cap.
Armour class. Mounting removes the AC your Tumble ranks were giving you (Tumble is cut by 65 while mounted). Mounted Combat hands some of it back as a Ride bonus - one point per 5 ranks, never more than the Tumble AC you lost and never less than one point per 10 ranks - and the mount adds 0 to +3 on top. It is dodge AC, so it counts against the +20 dodge cap.
Spell failure. Riding makes every spell you cast liable to fail - not just arcane ones, and not the same thing as arcane spell failure from armour. The mount sets the figure; every 5 ranks of Ride takes 10 percentage points off it. The best mounts start at 0.
Skills. Hide, Move Silently, Disable Trap, Open Lock, Pick Pocket and Set Trap are each cut by ten times the mount's penalty grade - so up to -50 on the commonest mounts, and nothing at all on the rarest. Tumble is cut by 65 regardless.
Speed. Your mount's speed replaces yours rather than adding to it, so a slow mount slows a monk down. And the mount's own figure is a ceiling you have to earn: what you actually move at is capped by your Ride ranks.
| Ride ranks | Speed cap |
|---|---|
| under 9 | 1.5 |
| 9 | 1.6 |
| 18 | 1.8 |
| 23 | 2.0 |
| 33 | 2.2 |
| 43 | 2.4 |
In combat that table only applies if you have Mounted Combat; without it you are held to 1.5 whatever your Ride says. The Mount Affinity feat sets your Ride to 43 for all of this, which is the top of the table.
The five tiers
Tier sets the level you need, and broadly tracks how good the mount is.
| Tier | Level | Mounts | Speed | AC | Attack | Spell failure | Skill penalty |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 - common | 5 | 47 | 1.5 to 1.7 | 0 to +1 | 0 | 25-30% | -40 to -50 |
| 2 - rare | 10 | 66 | 1.65 to 1.85 | 0 to +2 | 0 to +1 | 10-30% | -10 to -50 |
| 3 - epic | 15 | 59 | 1.65 to 2.0 | 0 to +3 | 0 to +3 | 10-30% | -10 to -50 |
| 4 - legendary | 25 | 54 | 1.75 to 2.3 | 0 to +3 | 0 to +2 | 5-20% | -10 to -30 |
| 5 - colossal | 39 | 14 | 2.0 to 2.4 | +3 | +2 to +3 | 0-10% | 0 to -10 |
The level is your character level with ECL counted in. Prices run from 20,000 gold at tier 1 to 30,000,000 at tier 5.
Where you can ride
Mounts work outdoors, in natural interiors, and in every dungeon. They are refused in ordinary built interiors, and in any area a builder has flagged against them. Two module-wide switches can narrow it further - one restricting mounts to outdoor areas, one forbidding them underground - and neither touches cities, dungeons, or an area flagged as an exception.
Being knocked off
Anything that would knock you down while mounted also rolls to unseat you: a Ride check, with your Dexterity, your gear and a d20 behind it, against a DC set by whatever hit you.
| What hit you | The DC |
|---|---|
| An ordinary knockdown attack | the attacker's attack bonus |
| A devastating critical | its DC, plus 10 |
| A spell | the spell's DC, plus 1, plus twice its innate level |
Two item properties change this. Dismount Protection subtracts its value from the DC. Immunity to Dismount skips the roll altogether - some item sets grant it. Being immune to knockdown is worth -3 to the DC, and it stops the ordinary knockdown case reaching you at all, though spells can still try.
Finding one in the window
The mount window searches by name, and also by condition: speed>=2, ac=4, lvl<10 and the like, on speed, tier, attack bonus, armour class and level.
Pets
Twenty-seven of them, in five tiers, learned onto the account the same way a mount is. Most are dropped by a dungeon boss - the one that carries it is named in the pet's own entry - and each has a price as well.