Making the best possible Heavy Warhorse.

[Karlton]

I play a Favored Soul pseudo-paladin knight in a high-level game, and my character is in the process of acquiring a castle that will serve as a base of operations for the rest of the campaign. My character has always loved horses, and thus I have decided that he is going to get into horse breeding when he gets the time and the space to do so. I know that horses basically suck in high-level environments, but as this is more of an optimization exercise and an in-game hobby project than an actual attempt to create a steed worthy of a near-epic spellcaster, I have decided to go through with it.

In short, what I want is to optimize the survivability and speed of a Heavy Warhorse.

Details:
- All official 3.5 books are allowed, but the use setting specific books except those specific to the DragonLance setting are discouraged.
- The process of breeding the horses must make sense to my story-gmaer DM. I can breed celestial horses by summoning them, but I will never be able to breed a half-dragon horse, because the DM will never allow me to convince a dragon to do a horse.
- Though there is numerous non-heavy warhorse creatures out there that would make better heavy warhorses than heavy warhorses, this thread shall focus on no other base creature than the heavy warhorse.
- Assume that adding class levels to the horses are impossible, even if we raise their int to 3+ by the virtue of templates.
- Giving the horses wings by any means is not allowed.

So far, I have come up with the following improvements:
- Redistribute all skill-points to Jump for extra mobility.
- Add the Celestial Creature template.
- Add the Magebred template from Ebberon. (The DM will most likely not let this fly).
- Replace Endurance with Dash (CWar) for extra mobility.

Thoughts?

[zook1shoe]

The best idea I have is.... Get Leadership and have a Tauric Warhorse with some super powerful templates on the lower half.

Beyond that, you have quite a few templates out there that can be applied to a warhorse

Maybe check out the dire or legendary horse

[Nanshork]

Also check out the Horrid Animal template from Eberron Campaign Setting.

[spacemonkey555]

If you budge on warhorse being the base animal, you might find warbeast horses to be better than warhorses, and if speed factors in, you might find you prefer light horses. Awakened magebred warbeast light horses might be best, if you can get them awakened easily.

warbeast (p219 mm2) gives +1 hd, +10 speed, gives +2 to rider's ride checks, +3 str, +3 con, +2 wis, +1 racial spot/listen, can't be applied to warhorses.

warhorse gives +1 hd, +1 natural ac, +2 str, +2 con, +1 wis

a light horse warbeast will be 20' faster than a heavy warhorse, without losing much of anything vs a heavy warhorse

[sirpercival]

The Warbeast template might help, as well.

And you can totally gank a Symbiotic warhorse.

[zook1shoe]

Tauric too

[JohnnyMayHymn]

Pseudonatural creature template from the epic level handbook is bonkers

Once you decide on what templates you're going with, kill your best horse and add the ghost template

[Thurbane]

I've used the Dire Horse with the War Beast template (both MM2) to create an Ultra Heavy Warhorse for my game...