What I would like to see is Constitution health regen benefit both mana and health. Thematically that would make more sense to me. Also, I realize Con is very valuable now as is.
However, I feel like this would allow both melee and mages to better diversify their builds by making INT feel less mandatory for everyone and provide more compelling decisions and thematically CON means you're planning for a longer term. Regen = longer term.

The net result would be an interesting choice where con means to both mages and melee a bit more gas in the tank for fights. Dex is more burst. Primary stat is more damage. Intuitive. Presents more build choices. And could promote longer TTK which I see as an additional bonus.

@Bancheis I agree overall with the idea that if you have something standard like a horse or something of similar powerful level that it dying of old age is tedious. I think rare mounts being powered in a way that they're nice to have but not feel like a "must" or there's an impossible power difference is the key here.

Maybe the rare mounts have a tiny advantage/convenience. Something like more health, speed up a little faster, or increase your carry weight slightly. Something not game changing but more convenient. Maybe some that increase cart speed specifically. Things that make life easier without giving a crazy tactical advantage.

That being said, no advantage mounts should be given infinite or a very long lifespan relative. Let us choose to participate and put the grind in or not. The game is plenty grindy already. Should also provide us a way to store them and the most important is that spawns of mounts need to be spread out much more/made more prevalent. Just my two cents!

Longer term, I hope they'll look at making group farming more relevant so we can have small scale skirmishes and promote more pvp opportunity in the world. Otherwise, we're still going to run into people farming outside of pvp areas almost exclusively as long as burst is king.

Hello,
I wanted to give some feedback and potential solutions to orb progression for the average player as it feels a bit discouraging at present.

You could change orbs in a way to make them apply to different schools. Either orbs that are based on the primary stat, group skills into some other orb groups where orbs cover multiple trees.

You could also make orbs all purpose “knowledge” orbs. Or make orbs have some sort of exchange rate of two to one. It would take the sting out of getting an orb and finding out it is a … mace orb for example.

As it stands, the amount of orbs or gold to farm to purchase orbs necessary to advance are so daunting in terms of time to achieve.