Art 4 trainer here, recently returned to training for the event, only to remember (even with the xp buffs) just how terrible this is compared to other life skills.
What follows is a list of problems and some potential fixes, without the need to change game mechanics (mostly). Apologies upfront if this is long or a little ranty. Trying to be calm and objective here.

Problems as I see it. 

-Mastery increased (almost) entirely through capture, which is very time consuming and awkward. Xp gains are incredibly slow!

-Levelling horses is crazy slow, and yet, pretty crucial to training as a discipline.

-Mastery rewards are pitiful! When compared to other life skills, lets say, cooking or gathering which offer higher quality produce and additional yields, trainers get... A tiny chance for more skills (although I still keep getting dud t7/8 horses more than anything of worth), a practically negligible additional chance for higher tier breeds and apparently higher chance to capture horses (which really does not bother me because I will catch that horse regardless).

-Potential for making money is absent. Yes, you CAN make money by catching a horse, training it to lvl15 and selling to imperial delivery, true, but how long does that take? We are talking hours upon hours for a tiny bit of money. If the time were spent on any other life skill you would make soooooo much more money. I'm not even talking double here, more like 5-10 times in most cases, in serious life skillers, way more than this. And even a maxed out trainer would not be able to make any difference to this outcome.

Some solutions (without changing too much beyond values)

-Mastery level increase. Yes, just give more xp! For catching, for levelling and why not award solid xp for actually training horse skills? After all, that is the only active training mechanic in the game. I would ask for more xp quests, like other life skills but I think the above suggestions would already be a massive improvement so I don't want to be greedy.

-Sort out the mastery rewards please. Auto sprint should be given at skilled or prof 1. It is such a grind to reach Art1 and it is really not going to grant any significant income as a result. Biggest change to mastery rewards here would be breeding IMO. Grant much better percentages for higher skilled trainers and they might actually make some profit. Also increase how quickly they can level horses. I mean why not? They will have already spent crazy hours grinding to get to Art or above, if they could level horses faster then they would bolster the horse market with higher level, better horses for all. This is numbers again, skill learning... I have noticed zero increase in higher tier horses learning skills so far. Makes the hours I have invested into this feel like a total waste of time. Surely higher level trainers would be able to make MUCH better horses - And yes, I would add that the chance to train natural coursers should be significantly higher! Significantly! It is generally accepted amongst training circles that in order to make coursers, you will have to invest not just in game millions, or in game countless hours, but also real world money. And really, who gets into training unless they want to make coursers. I've never heard gatherers or cooks saying that you simply NEED to invest real world money to get any progress but in training, it is a given. Why not reserve the pay to train element for those who do not wish to level up training but would nonetheless like to have a go at making a courser.
-Level horses faster according to your mastery. I won't bang on quite so much here because the above changes would make slow horse levelling far more pallatable but seriously, this would make a lot of sense. Perhaps the Art1 reward could be that all you horse gear applies to wagons (which, could probably do with a dedicated space so as not to get in other peoples way and make them kill you while life skilling).

-As for money. Well, if the above were implemented, we would be able to make some finally :)

This list is an attempt to tackle the major issues primarily through tweaking numbers instead of adding additional gameplay features or mechanics. It really does feel like there has been a long period of neglect for training, to the point that it does not feel like a life skill at all. Basically, if you want a good horse, buy one. The time and real world money required just to get a courser (never mind a dream) is so steep that is not worth it, and incredibly boring. I will not be spending any significant time on horses after this event as the rewards are so small and the time spent in game is genuinely not enjoyable. And games are ultimatley supposed to be enjoyable. Obviously, if there are solid rewards, a bit of suffering is worth it. But after suffering for so long and the rewards still being so far away and the actual minute to minute gameplay being so unenjoyable I need to do other things in the game so that it is actually fun.

Would like to hear from other trainers. These changes feel fair to me but may not to you. Thanks for your time and Kudos for making it to the bottom of this post. Happy adventuring (not training obvs because it s broken) :)

Thats because horse training is afk and cooking is semi-afk.

I'm not exactly certain of the point you're making there friend?

Breeding, catching and skill learning cannot be afk whereas levelling can be afk for sure. Cooking has a pretty large afk element to it and this nets good xp and money, not to mention solid rewards for mastery.

Could you clarify please?

Thanks for posting also

Autosprint is fine at Artisan 1. It's very easy reach that. It take less than 200 horses to lvl up from begginer 1 to artisan 1. And the average time to capture a horse it's 2 minutes, so it takes less than 6 hours. 

I don't think they should increase the experience that horses give, but the speed at which they are captured yes.

I agree to add more quests. The only one it's a poor daily quest which grants only 1 awaken mat. I think than, idk, maybe 1 weekly quest (ex capture 200 horses, which takes 7 hours, 1 hour per day) and as a reward 50 awakening materials. 

The actual breeding chance from mastery it's fine for me. I don't see the problem. 

I agree with most of what you said, except two things.

1. The amount of EXP we get by taming horses, I don't have exact numbers atm so would have to double check that with you but I vaguely remember when I was leveling my farming from Art 10 to Master 1, each prune would give me about...0.06% give or take. Getting my Training from Master 4 to Master 5 with a similar amount of buffs was giving me 0.50% ish per capture. So the amount of EXP you get is fair, at least imo.

2. It has been proven through testing in the horse discord that if you breed two T8 at lv30 with approx 850 mastery, you are guaranteed T8 offspring. The x%+ you see from mastery might sound really low and useless, but it works different in paper with the breeding grade. So mastery for breeding is descent.

All coursers are useless except T8, which as you already pointed out, cost real money. Why do I say this? Because getting 2 skills on an offspring does not make any real difference when skill gain is so heavily RNG-based not even your mastery helps.

I don't think we need higher monetary rewards (except for boosting Rent, and the added possibility of renting T9) The game needs reasons for Trainers to produce horses, specially when it costs real money produce good ones. Maybe for the trade rework? Time Trial Solo horse racing with lower tiers? There's plenty of possibilities. The average player doesn't need more than 1 horse. Maybe 2-3 if they slowly upgrade to a T8 with good stats.

"If you want a good one, buy it" Sadly that is a general mindset that applies to a lot of things in this game. Take it from me who said "Oh, crafting the Forest Path Wagon should be cheaper/easier than getting 2B to buy it." Now I have to buy the Trace of Death, which total about 600m and barely at 500/4000 piece of image...with 4B in my storage :)

"Nevermind a Dream" probably by dev design, horse training has zero relation with horse awakening. You can tell me "but that doesn't make sense/that's not logic" No, it really doesn't sound logical but you can ask any Master+ Trainer what benefits they have when awakening horses compared to a Professional Trainer and the extra materials given by Shamhain and Wapra are so negligible they are barely worth mentioning. Perhaps the point in time in which Training was designed and the time courser/awakening system was introduced were far apart and that's why they are almost two completely different topics, but overall, I think horse trainers deserve benefits who bridge the two.

Thanks for the post Khaara. Do you manage to make any significant profit from training? 

I life skill in a few other areas - cooking, gathering, bartering, farming and fishing and, despite investing far more time and money into training, all of these skills give a lot more profit and mastery rewards, not to mention are far faster to level up the mastery in.

You don't feel that horses should level faster? This I am surprised at. I feel this is the biggest bottleneck to generating any meaningful profit, especially with higher tier horses, requiring days of continual riding to get up to breeding levels.

I would argue that the caculation for how long it takes to capture horses is not quite right - given that there is travel time and the occassional server change when there are no horses at that spot. But I see your point nonetheless.

Thank you for joining the discussion :)

Lots of good stuff to chew on here :) I think you make a very good point about the specific time frames and the age of the existing horse mechanics. It feels very much as though the training skill has been given very little further thought even though a lot has changed in that time. 

I eagerly read patch notes all the time, stupidly thinking that one day I will see the 'Horse training buffs' title in there 😂 But I just don't see people talking about it. Pretty sure it's the only life skill you can regularly log onto a server and see Artisan featured in the rankings. Gives a clear indication as to how unpopular it is (admittadly, my current server goes from Master 3-18).

I considered the forest path, did some calculations and paled at the thought. Really should be cheaper to make the damn thing!

Thank you for your thoughts. Very much appreciated 👍

Also, interesting to hear that the actual figures don't seem to marry with the stated percentages

PA said than they have plans to add new wagons when the trading rework update releases. So maybe the new wagons will increase the leveling speed of horses.