The high-pivot hype cycle peaked a few years ago. Every brand with a CAD file and a marketing budget was suddenly very interested in idler pulleys and rearward axle paths. Forbidden was doing it before most of them, and the Dreadnought was the bike that made the argument.
Now there's a two-year owner review out from The Pro's Closet, and it's the kind of document that matters more than any press release: a rider who bought the bike, put real miles on it, and came back with a verdict. For anyone trying to understand where Forbidden's gravity platform actually stands in the Cascadia enduro market, this is the ground truth worth reading.
What the Dreadnought V2 Is, Without the Marketing Layer
The Pro's Closet review covers a 2024 Dreadnought V2 Tier 1 — 160mm rear travel, 170mm front, full 29-inch wheels, and a 450mm reach on the S2 frame at 5'10" rider height. The reviewer swapped the stock air shock for a RockShox Vivid Coil, which is exactly what experienced enduro riders tend to do when they want to find out what a platform is actually capable of. The bike came in at roughly 36 pounds with pedals before the coil swap, which is honest weight for a bike in this category.
Forbidden positions the Dreadnought as an enduro and bike-park bike. That's a wide brief — the kind of positioning that can mean "genuinely versatile" or "compromised in both directions." After two years and a Front Range riding diet that included bike parks, the reviewer's conclusion lands closer to the former: the high-pivot suspension geometry is genuinely useful on fast, rough terrain, and the rearward axle path delivers what the design promises on the kind of trails where it matters.
That's not a small thing. A lot of bikes promise rough-terrain composure and deliver it only when the terrain is rough in the right way. The Dreadnought's geometry — that unusually high main pivot, the idler pulley that makes the whole system work — earns its complexity on the trails where Cascadia riders actually push bikes hard.
The Setup Conversation the Review Opens Up
One detail worth pulling out: the reviewer's tire choice was Maxxis Assegai front, Minion DHR II rear. That's a conventional, proven enduro setup — and it points to a broader conversation happening right now in the gravity tire market.
Continental's recent expansion of their Argotal, Kryptotal, and Xynotal lineups — 13 new casing and compound combinations — is a direct response to the same tension the Dreadnought V2 embodies: riders want maximum grip without the weight penalty of a full downhill casing. The new Enduro SuperSoft pairings and Trail Soft options are built for exactly the kind of bike the Dreadnought is. A 160/170mm enduro platform that you're actually pedaling up to the top of a Cascadia ridge needs a different tire answer than a bike park shuttle sled, and the market is finally catching up to that nuance.
What This Means for the Cascadia Enduro Market
Here's the honest read: Forbidden isn't announcing a new gravity platform right now, at least not based on anything in the current source pool. What they have is a platform — the Dreadnought V2 — that has now accumulated enough real-world rider time to be evaluated on its merits rather than its geometry diagrams.
That matters for the Cascadia market specifically. This region's enduro riders are not impressed by axle-path animations. They want to know how a bike handles the wet roots on the lower half of a North Shore descent after you've already spent two hours climbing to get there. The two-year review from The Pro's Closet is the kind of evidence that moves the needle here — a rider who bought the bike, rode it hard, and reported back without a PR filter.
The verdict, as it stands: the high-pivot design delivers on its core promise for fast, rough enduro terrain and bike-park riding. The complexity is real — the idler pulley, the maintenance overhead, the weight — but so is the performance. For Cascadia riders who spend time at places where that rearward axle path earns its keep, the Dreadnought V2 has a legitimate case.
Watch for whether Forbidden's in-house motor development changes how they position the Dreadnought platform going forward. A high-pivot geometry that works this well on rough terrain is an interesting foundation for an eMTB application — and that's a conversation the brand has already started having publicly.