First you need 7600 points to get the divine.

You get points by feeding two candies to each kid that shows up. The points depends on what you give and if you give all right ones. Giving two of the easiest will get you 22 points. Giving two rarest gives you 26 points. Giving a mixture of rare, medium and common will earn you from 23 to 25 points.

So for this calculation I am going to use 24 points. On this basis you will need 318 kids to come knocking for the promo duration ( estimated 19 days). Calculated by dividing 24 into 7600.

You are given 6 kids the first day and it increases by 1 extra kid per day. This will give you 261 kids for the complete promo. Enough to get all the prizes without spending any passes.

You will be approx 57 kids short of the total required for the divine. If you wait for the promo "special" which gives you 3 extra kids plus 1 treat for each jar from common to rare ( guaranteed).

So what this means is even if you have all the treats available to give you will need to spend passes to get the 57 kids you are short, no getting around it.

My suggestion is to buy 10 of the special the first weekend it is offered and buy the rest you need from the second special when it is offered. This is the best way to take advantage of the free kids and buying only the kids needed when the second special is offered at the last weekend (the end of the promo).

There are a lot of VIPs who have never bought passes/no longer buy passes/only buy passes rarely/at certain times of year (e.g. buying Christmas packs), and many of them use pass horses to pay for their VIP subscription. With pass horses it is guaranteed that they will be able to get the 10 passes they need - plus the ability to get up to 20 more passes a month for spending on other things.
With the change, all it takes is one day of not logging in, or even one point missed when they do log in but don't manage to hit all the point earning actions for that day, and they don't have the passes for their next month's subscription. Also, without the possibility of earning more passes by killing off pass horses for the 1/3 chance of a pass, there will probably be players who decide they need the passes more than they need the VIP subscription, and either downsize to a Pegasus account or don't bother with a subscription at all.
Of course, pass horses aren't the only way of getting passes without buying them, and most VIPs have pass income from elsewhere too, but they are the most reliable way of maintaining VIP subscription without paying. I doubt there will be a mass exodus of non-pass buyer VIPs, but I do think there will be quite a few who will decide to downsize.

The promo after this one is the Celtic Cards promo.

However, we won't know until this change goes on for awhile how it will affect the horse market. You never know what could happen after all. Comparing now to a few years ago, I don't think that players spend passes on horses like they used to. We have Peggy and VIP accounts now that players use their passes on, and the constant promos are also a pass drain. With this change I really don't know that *everyone* will have the ability to earn 10 passes like they do now. I still think pass horses are a more reliable method because you don't have to log in everyday to get those passes. And, we currently have the possibility to get another 20 passes if you feel like going through a ton of extra pass horses to get them. From the info we have those extra 20 passes are going to be nixed. As the current system stands I rarely spend a pass to buy a horse. If this change goes through then "rarely" will become...well, whatever less than "rarely" is. If I keep my VIP I'll only have a few extra passes that I'll be lucky to get from selling horses. I don't know if I'd rather use them in promos or on horse sales. My theory is that less players will be buying horses with passes because you are now only limited to 10 a month, if you log in everyday and get your points. You won't have a possible 30 a month. Just my personal theory, and I do hope I'm wrong. I suppose it is also possible that players who didn't bother with pass horses before will now get passes due to their game play style being more suited to the change. I just think it will be offset by the amount of players who do better with pass horses that might not do so well with this new change. I think what is certain is that some players will benefit from this change and others will not.

Do we know how much the Treat Packs will cost?

What I dont think people are considering is that you wont be getting 10 passes all at once. Itll be 1 pass every 3 days. For some people, the temptation to buy something or use a pass on a promo will be too great and they will not be able to renew vip. Also what about the people whos VIP needs to be renewed at the middle of the month? Itll take a bit more strategy to do instead of killing off 10 horses all at once.

i feel that one improvement that could be made to this if it must be put on the game is having like a 'meter for the month', what do I mean by this? Having a meter that has 300 points with 10 being able to be gained each day and every time you get 30 you can get a pass. People could choose to let the points stack or claim the pass as soon as they reach the next 30. The meter would reset every time it has reached 300 and the pass or passes have been claimed. This would fix the whole losing points thing and help prevent people from spending when they are trying to save. Doubt it would happen, though.

We're talking about the future (in the works) change, where Howrse is planning to take pass horses away as a way to earn passes, and instead replace them with a different Loyal Player's Pass system.

only the dates would be removed, not the items. So unless you have an item that expires before Nov.8th, which I'd recommend using asap, you're safe.

Well, bad news guys. Got to test the changes with the pass system and the new divine. The divine is totally worthless. You get no items or diamonds or anything out of it. You just get to age it with aging rings whenever you kill and send off a 25+ horse. There will be a ranking system among the divine as to which one is the oldest but that is it.