Hi all, this is a small guide showing to the riders community how you should maximize your pet to gain as much as possible while riding it.
1st all, let’s check what bonuses that the riding skill give us:
- 25% of the Pet max HP is added to your max HP
- 10% of the Pet Physical Defense is added to your Physical Defense
- 8% of the Pet Evasion is added to your Evasion
- Warning! If the Pet has 0 stamina, then no stats will be added.
Now, with the last patch, we got up to 4 slots to dedicate for our pet:
- Hoglan: 1 weapon and 1 armor
- Penguin: 2 weapon and 2 armor, plus 30 phisical & magic def
- Battlebird: 2 weapon and 2 armor, plus 85 hp regen & 125 SP regen
Obv, the penguin is the facto the best pet for riding classes given the defense stacking you gain, while battlebird is the best for grinding (especially if u have the addon that let you know when to seat down each 10 seconds).
Hoglan lag behind, but since it is the best “free” mount you can follow this guide, just gaining half the value from items stacking.
General addition things that matter:
-Your pet can wear 2x of the same item, even legendaries and he doesn’t care about class only limitations
- Your pet can wear 2x of any 2h weapon like they were 1handed (hulk mode on)
- Your pet will wear shields in his ARMOR slot (thx @tampon )
-Your pet gain the same bonus from stats like you do (he has hidden stats of his own that gives him normal bonuses, like 1 con = 85hp etc)
-HP stacking has the best “return to investment ratio”, given that you gain 25%HP vs 10% phisical def vs 8% evasion - Gems on main hand // off hand given to our pet provide us no bonus, while our char gain the standard 10% phisical def 25% hp from yellow and red gems if we do socket our pet armor (top&bottom) with them
This is my lvl 330 penguin, he’s called Akke and I love him so much I consider him a standalone chraracter 
And this is my lvl 330 SR naked
While I ride Akke, when we are both naked, I look like this:
Gaining exactly 25% of his HP, 10% of his phisical defense, 8% of his evasion
Now, how did I dress Akke? Well, I chosed to stick with the best HP gears I could give him, since I had benefict from them the most, so we enter:
I chosed to go with catacomb rapier couz is the main hand // off hand with the most HP (1.6k+), keep in mind there are cheaper options if u want to save a bit of gold.
The armor is a bit more painfull, even if nowadays virtov plate recipe is cheap and fast to farm, It’s the 1st real option for our pet to stack HP with (1.5k+ hp and 2 sockets).
Here is Akke, finally geared (2x catacomb rapier, 2x virtov plate robe +1 with lvl 5 red gems)
And that’s me while riding him:
As you can see, I gained
-2415hp
-27phisical defense
Is it worth it?
Well, if you do main a riding class, I would say YES. The possibility to run with 0 con is kinda easy if you are a DPS rider class (my SR has 31 con invested, but my hacka will be fine with 0 while running Akke).
If you combine a geared pet with 2x headslots with HP (ideal bifecta with HP&phisical atk), this will be enough to grant you almost 20k hp at 0 con, no matter which armor you will have, so you could easily dress any type of armor you like with yellow gems on top+bottom for phisical defense stacking, finally free to drop a “must have” plate set with red gems for your HP needings.
I hope this short guide will help you finding your best gear for your mount.
GL in game
Banjo
I need def or evasion. I have a mounted Mergen and I do hop off for arrow sprinkler than hop back…so I actually lose the HP all the time…
But that won’t be a top priority for a long time for me. 
thx again for the upgrade over catacomb rapier.