Hey all, I thought I'd do something a little different with this sale, as I've had a few people ask me how to value their dragons in game over the week... and when I went around on my taming rounds, I saw someone at Fire Temple beating up a reasonably fair one; I stopped to ask if he knew it was worth a fair bit, and he was indeed attempting to tame it. But it got me thinking again as to how people would know... So here's an auction of a Greater Dragon, and an explanation of what you're looking at.
(Scroll down to the bolded line for the auction if you're just interested in buying! Note, this dragon has only just been tamed. It is not at it's full stats as yet, so if you plan to bid later, bear in mind it may still not be at the time the auction ends, depending on how much time I get free to train it.)
So, after Fire Temple I wandered around to Wind, and found a second worth having a look at... the server down time seems to have shaken the good beasties out of the net! Here's the stats as I saw them in the wild;
"But I don't have the EC!" I hear you cry! Well, there's somewhat of a fortunate question hanging over the Pinco UI in this area. It doesn't use the rating system that the older, still pretty much the standard Pet Power Calculator does; it will consistently give a lower rating by about .1 to .3 compared to Pet Power. The important thing is being able to read the stats at a glance and see which are worth a second, longer look. The EC helps with this, but isn't essential.
What are we looking for then? This is what will happen post tame:
* Resists remain the same
* Hit Points and Strength will drop by 50%, if they go below 125 they can be trained up to 125 what ever the pre-tamed stats. (I have 125 strength chickens and cows and rabbits!)
* Skills (Magery etc) will drop below, but can be retrained back to 90% of their pre-tame total, or 100 points, which is ever is lower. 90% will be it's final state.
* Magery skill only will reduce to it's final total if it's above 100%, everything below that can be trained to 100 like any other. So 101 magery is it's final, visible immediately post tame, and 99 magery can be raised to 100.
Now let's look at the dragon stats again, pretending we're loring it in the wild... the first thing that gets me to stop is total hitpoints. For a Greater Dragon, anything above 1800 is worth looking at, as that will halve to 900 hit points, a pretty respectable sum.
The second part is the Physical Resist. Long, long ago dragons used to be able to fly and try and stay at ranged, but it lead to all sorts of funky getting-stuck-on-scenery antics; now every pet will close to melee range no matter what it is. Thus you want this to be as high as possible, as the constant source of incoming Damage will be Physical. We can see the maximum possible is 85% Physical Resist, so 83% is again respectable. Depending on the wider stats, this would be a definite taming candidate then!
Where Pet Calc and Pinco differ the most I suspect is that Pet Calc rates overall resists much, much higher than Pinco does, which seems to lean on Skills a little more. My own view as a life long tamer is that Pet Calc is more accurate; pets aren't much use if they are dead or, at low health, panicking and running about instead of fighting. Certainly for a Greater Dragon which is mostly used as a mega meat shield, soaking damage is it's main role... Pinco will show you at a glance how many resists from the total possible you're short, but in general anything from 0 (Godly!) to -25 missing (pushing not worth it unless it's a free one for your own use) is, in my estimation where the range of high level pets are.
Our Greater Dragon has -16 from the total, so we're thumbs up so far!
But what about the skills themselves? This one comes down to personal preference. Some rate high magery for casting pets, some prefer Wrestle/Tactics as they all end up face to face anyway... my view is towards Wrestle as casters tend to mana dump quickly and not have the mana for larger spells very often (which is why Magery is the one stat that goes to it's total straight away, it's a swine to raise once lost as pets don't cast the spells of the difficulty they need enough)
Resisting Spells only effects Debuff spells (curse, weaken) etc, not the basic damage done by spell casting; energy spells check against your Energy Resist instead. Our Greater Dragon's weakest resist is Cold at 47%, but Dragons as a species don't like cold much anyway... and half our missing resists, 8% are in that one stat. But on the other hand, that means all our others aren't too far from the maximum! And as not many of the naughty people in our lands use cold, we're actually stronger over all; If we're after a specialist pet (such as a Cu Sidhe for farming honor against Succubi) it's worth looking for specific resists, but for an all rounder like a GD, this one's fine!
As mentioned at the start, it's not yet trained though; so now it's mine, let's look at what we can train up too. Remember, Half HPs/Str, 90% reduction in skills, back up to 100 if below, magery can't expand further if it's above 100;
Greater Dragon's Final Stats: The Auctioning!
Pinco rates the final product as a 4 star. Pet Calc however has it as a 4.3 rated dragon at completion.
(Currently 4.1 with untrained skills)
So to the selling then; This will go to the highest bidder by 8pm UK Time On Sunday 14th April 2013, or if someone is desperate to own, there is a 20m Buyout Price. Bidding extended by 30 minutes per bit post as 8pm UK time approaches, all bids to be made on this thread.
It's final stats may not match the above at trade time, as I may not get time to fully train between now and Sunday, but I shall try. If people aren't prepared to pay until they match, that's fine... but hopefully I've explained how you can predict what they'll be in the future for your own information!
(Scroll down to the bolded line for the auction if you're just interested in buying! Note, this dragon has only just been tamed. It is not at it's full stats as yet, so if you plan to bid later, bear in mind it may still not be at the time the auction ends, depending on how much time I get free to train it.)
So, after Fire Temple I wandered around to Wind, and found a second worth having a look at... the server down time seems to have shaken the good beasties out of the net! Here's the stats as I saw them in the wild;
So then, first things first; where did I get those stats from? Well, if you have the Enhanced Client, the Pinco UI will instantly copy details to the Ultima Online\Logs folder, and it's rating for the creature will appear in the Lore gump (if it has the default name).
"But I don't have the EC!" I hear you cry! Well, there's somewhat of a fortunate question hanging over the Pinco UI in this area. It doesn't use the rating system that the older, still pretty much the standard Pet Power Calculator does; it will consistently give a lower rating by about .1 to .3 compared to Pet Power. The important thing is being able to read the stats at a glance and see which are worth a second, longer look. The EC helps with this, but isn't essential.
What are we looking for then? This is what will happen post tame:
* Resists remain the same
* Hit Points and Strength will drop by 50%, if they go below 125 they can be trained up to 125 what ever the pre-tamed stats. (I have 125 strength chickens and cows and rabbits!)
* Skills (Magery etc) will drop below, but can be retrained back to 90% of their pre-tame total, or 100 points, which is ever is lower. 90% will be it's final state.
* Magery skill only will reduce to it's final total if it's above 100%, everything below that can be trained to 100 like any other. So 101 magery is it's final, visible immediately post tame, and 99 magery can be raised to 100.
Now let's look at the dragon stats again, pretending we're loring it in the wild... the first thing that gets me to stop is total hitpoints. For a Greater Dragon, anything above 1800 is worth looking at, as that will halve to 900 hit points, a pretty respectable sum.
The second part is the Physical Resist. Long, long ago dragons used to be able to fly and try and stay at ranged, but it lead to all sorts of funky getting-stuck-on-scenery antics; now every pet will close to melee range no matter what it is. Thus you want this to be as high as possible, as the constant source of incoming Damage will be Physical. We can see the maximum possible is 85% Physical Resist, so 83% is again respectable. Depending on the wider stats, this would be a definite taming candidate then!
Where Pet Calc and Pinco differ the most I suspect is that Pet Calc rates overall resists much, much higher than Pinco does, which seems to lean on Skills a little more. My own view as a life long tamer is that Pet Calc is more accurate; pets aren't much use if they are dead or, at low health, panicking and running about instead of fighting. Certainly for a Greater Dragon which is mostly used as a mega meat shield, soaking damage is it's main role... Pinco will show you at a glance how many resists from the total possible you're short, but in general anything from 0 (Godly!) to -25 missing (pushing not worth it unless it's a free one for your own use) is, in my estimation where the range of high level pets are.
Our Greater Dragon has -16 from the total, so we're thumbs up so far!
But what about the skills themselves? This one comes down to personal preference. Some rate high magery for casting pets, some prefer Wrestle/Tactics as they all end up face to face anyway... my view is towards Wrestle as casters tend to mana dump quickly and not have the mana for larger spells very often (which is why Magery is the one stat that goes to it's total straight away, it's a swine to raise once lost as pets don't cast the spells of the difficulty they need enough)
Resisting Spells only effects Debuff spells (curse, weaken) etc, not the basic damage done by spell casting; energy spells check against your Energy Resist instead. Our Greater Dragon's weakest resist is Cold at 47%, but Dragons as a species don't like cold much anyway... and half our missing resists, 8% are in that one stat. But on the other hand, that means all our others aren't too far from the maximum! And as not many of the naughty people in our lands use cold, we're actually stronger over all; If we're after a specialist pet (such as a Cu Sidhe for farming honor against Succubi) it's worth looking for specific resists, but for an all rounder like a GD, this one's fine!
As mentioned at the start, it's not yet trained though; so now it's mine, let's look at what we can train up too. Remember, Half HPs/Str, 90% reduction in skills, back up to 100 if below, magery can't expand further if it's above 100;
Greater Dragon's Final Stats: The Auctioning!
But there's 3 skills when halved with 2 decimal place results, and Ultima Online only shows to the nearest .1... so what will happen to those? In my experience they always round up, so they will be come 117.3, 118.1, and 118.1 ... and coincidentally, we can prove this! As Magery and Resisting Spells both started at 131.2, and post tame I can see the Magery now is indeed 118.1.
Pinco rates the final product as a 4 star. Pet Calc however has it as a 4.3 rated dragon at completion.
(Currently 4.1 with untrained skills)
So to the selling then; This will go to the highest bidder by 8pm UK Time On Sunday 14th April 2013, or if someone is desperate to own, there is a 20m Buyout Price. Bidding extended by 30 minutes per bit post as 8pm UK time approaches, all bids to be made on this thread.
It's final stats may not match the above at trade time, as I may not get time to fully train between now and Sunday, but I shall try. If people aren't prepared to pay until they match, that's fine... but hopefully I've explained how you can predict what they'll be in the future for your own information!
