I'm not sure lol, tipicly its my party supost to be fighting something but they go PET!!! lol... except that one time where they found a rust monster that was minding its own business eating and hadn't even noticed them... and the barbarian chose to behead it while the fighter was trying to convince him to just leave it alone... rust monster didn't even get a chance ): 

Some ( more) comments from the peanut gallery:
1A) cost of a wyvern mount - Against Tiamat campaign- at the village and giant’s flying castle you can get wyvern mounts. Played right you can even keep them.
1B) cost of a wyvern mount - find a mated pair of wyverns and their nest with eggs ready to hatch, kill the parents (have fun), take the eggs and empress the hatchlings, raise and train them to be your mounts.
2) way back in 1e PCs got followers  at around L10. These were low level NPCs (L1-3 generally) or various beasts (welcome to the game origin of the beast master ranger) that befriended them and traveled with them. These were similar to sidekicks but were full PCs just low level. We used them as camp guards etc and then for one offs of camp fights or low levels. Quickies when someone in the main campaign was absent. That gave us guarded camps to leave extra gear (tents, weapons, armor, treasure, etc) and mounts.

I miss followers and the whole rule set for them.

Half my campaign’s NPCs are my old PCs and their followers.

UPDATE:
Barding is now mandatory for the horse.  New mounted combat means its rolled against your horse's AC, and you choose to take the damage or not after it hits.  Enjoy the extra cost of 6000GP for fullplate barding.  Merchant will reduce it by 1200gp ofc.


IMO the feat is now bad.  I'll give my reasoning.

Giving the mount evasion sounds great, but no existing game mount has a dex save over +2 at best.  Most of the time its +1.  Its still going to fail 1/2 the time even at L1 before the enemy DCs start scaling up and even at half damage, the average damage of a fireball is still more than 2x the base HP of a riding horse.  as soon as you hit L5, an enemy can one shot your mount 1/2 the time with a fireball, only almost one shotting it 1/4 times when it both passes the 50% chance of passing a save and they roll below average damage.  It will likely only survive one in four fireballs.  If a sorcerer cast the fireball with heighten or empower metamagic, RIP horse.

The taking the damage for the mount may work... but it now renders the cavalier AC irrelavant.  They can just target the horse and make you take the damage or end up unmounted, making barding, which costs 4x as much as your armour, mandatory.  Even then any spell or feature without an attack roll (anything with a DC) ignores this.  That is to say, anything with a DC, you cant take the hit in the place of the horse.

This does however remain useful for a Paladin IMO.  The feat is of use to paladins with find steed since they have scaling AC and scaling HP of 5+10/spell level, max 55.  The paladin also grants its protective aura to the Dex saves of the mount, maing its evasion grating work more reliably.


Its worth noting it's still got 2 niche cases:

1) any foe smaller than the mount can be attacked with advantage.  Super good for rogues and smiting paladins.  The paladin will keep the bonus for longer, due to find steed resilience but its also great for a horse archer build, since the rogue can get advantage without steady aiming on the mount shooting medium foes... thus some options of subclass bonus actions open up, without costing you sneak attack.  Thief or arcane trickster rogues for example, or dual wielders.

2) small races mounting player characters with the carrying capacity.  PCs have better dex saves, usually, and definitely better HP.  Giving a fighter or mage evasion is great, even if you can now only attack small or smaller foes with advantage.  Super fun riding a goliath into battle with their Large Form feature.

If your campaign is mostly outdoors, either exploration or travel (caravan guarding etc) mounts make a certain amount of sense - faster than a wagon/cart, decent carry capacity, etc. mounts in combat almost never make sense - in DnD. Just how often are using your mounts to stay 90-150 ft from a few while peppering them with arrows and spells? And forget about mounts in a dungeon crawl. At best you’re trying to bring a mule or donkey down with you to pack treasure out on as other mounts won’t go into the place.  As for horse archers they don’t even have he right weapon available. You’re basically stuck with either the short bow ( really a toy) or a reimagined long bow with properties that don’t really work well mounted. The real horse bow was a recurved composite bow with horn  - wood - sinew construction that was roughly 3 feet long making it wield on horseback but with the same draw pulls, range and damage of a long bow. If anything it actually outranged the longbow.

Quote from Wi1dBi11 >>

If your campaign is mostly outdoors, either exploration or travel (caravan guarding etc) mounts make a certain amount of sense - faster than a wagon/cart, decent carry capacity, etc. mounts in combat almost never make sense - in DnD. Just how often are using your mounts to stay 90-150 ft from a few while peppering them with arrows and spells? And forget about mounts in a dungeon crawl. At best you’re trying to bring a mule or donkey down with you to pack treasure out on as other mounts won’t go into the place.  As for horse archers they don’t even have he right weapon available. You’re basically stuck with either the short bow ( really a toy) or a reimagined long bow with properties that don’t really work well mounted. The real horse bow was a recurved composite bow with horn  - wood - sinew construction that was roughly 3 feet long making it wield on horseback but with the same draw pulls, range and damage of a long bow. If anything it actually outranged the longbow.

Phantom Steed spell for the win