The Inequality of Animal Husbandry
Something that came up in another thread was the fact that animal husbandry has the potential to be split into four overall branches - Mounts, Battle Pets, Beasts of Burden, and Livestock. This is great and all, but there's a secondary problem that spawns out of this solution, and that's the inequality of the different animal husbandry branches.
Mounts have long been a prestige item in various MMOs, and that's not going to change here. Even leaving aside that gaining a rare mount and adding it to your collection is something players can end up spending hundreds of hours on by itself, they have a utility function that's useful to everyone, including the utterly casual - getting from place to place faster. In fact, most games are designed from the ground up to be best handled at mount speeds, or doing things only mounts can do (such as the highly praised mount system in Guild Wars 2, which actually manages to make traversal fairly fun). Tier 2 mounts in Ashes are going to have the ability to glide, which as far as I'm aware is going to be the only way to gain that element of things.
So where does that leave the other options? It leaves them with two problems; prestige, and capability expansion. Let me go down the list of where the other three fail in this regard.
Battle pets are in an interesting spot because they have capability expansion in the form of having an extra body on the field, even if you need to give up a little in the way of stats to pull them out. This is potentially useful and also fairly interesting. However, there's problems - with the nature of the way classes work in ashes, diminishing your own capability for a pet that's liable to be nowhere as strong as you are is likely going to end up with the pet as more of a liability than a boon; my prime example of this is Guild Wars 2, in which players were begging for a way to turn off the ranger's pet because it caused problems for groups that were managing fight mechanics and the systems of the game. If this same problem is present in Ashes, it could cripple the utility of battle pets, while they also don't have the same level of prestige as mounts.
Beasts of burden are actually better off than battle pets, due to being essentially mounts that have given up part of their stats in order to gain an expansive inventory. The extra inventory space naturally gives us a solid reason to pick them up, due to being able to carry around resources well in excess of the player's inventory, but once a certain level of inventory space is achieved - whatever practical limit that is - players won't have any reason to pursue things further. Simply put, beasts of burden are all utility and no prestige, and getting to be 'good enough' is where people will stop.
Livestock is the worst off here, having both no prestige and disconnected utility. Can you gain utility from a cow, for instance? Absolutely. It can provide plenty of milk, and when you're ready to butcher it it can provide lots of high quality meat and other resources. But this requires several extra steps, specific skills for doing it, and... it's a cow. There's very, very few people chomping at the bit to get a cow, or pig, or goat, or other farm animal in their video game, meaning it has both highly restricted utility and incredibly low prestige.
The reason why this is a problem is it means that mount trainers are going to be in excessive demand over other types of animal husbandry specialists, and livestock handlers might even be regarded as something of a shit job guilds need filled but are forced to foist on people who otherwise would have gone for a different profession.
So how is this issue dealt with? The simplest and most direct way I can think of is to have additional tiers for the other forms of animal husbandry as well. By the example that mounts set, an additional tier for animals increases the level of capability it has in completing its function, in the form of Tier 2 mounts adding an additional traversal method (gliding). If we can add tier 2 animals to each of the different branches of animal husbandry, especially if these tier 2 animals are unique to this branch of animal husbandry and thus have some level of expanded capability and uniqueness, that should add much needed prestige to them. If these animals have unique abilities not found anywhere else in the game, or are an expansion on the core conceits of their animal husbandry type, that'd also benefit them greatly, and make things more equal.
