I've seen in a couple of places that training a dread is useless...that I nightmare can just about accomplish the same thing...and I just don't see it. Now granted, I started playing again (after 2 years off), after Publish 98. But I've seen no jumps, and have basically trained my dread exactly how I would have wanted.
So I have a pre-patch mare to compare to my dread...and my dread was an excellent pet to begin with (really a strong strong pet with only Cold resist being about as low as can be, so it was rated 3.9). The pre-patch mare is inferior to my dread, in my opinion. It took a full slot of training from a strong 4.1 rated nightmare to just get to the level of my dread (HP, Int, and resists)...so already we're at a wash as far as the nightmare accomplishing the same as a dread (remembering that the dread was 3 slots and the nighmare was 2 slots).
Now I did add poisoning to my nighmare. I would not recommend that. I'm still trying to GM poisoning so I can likely waste more points on magery mastery just to allow my nightmare to cast magery again. I've heard that there is an outside chance that once GM poisoning is reached, magery is re-activated, but I haven't gotten there yet so I'm not sure. Depending on what I add as far as Power Scrolls go (I'll likely go 110s), and if I add poison breath (and if I have to add magery mastery) I could have more HP and regens than my dread...I'm not certain.
Here's what my dread looks like :
900 HP
700 Str / 150 Dex / 160 Int (it had 158...so I used one point to round it up because I'm OCD like that)
150 Stamina / 608 Mana
80 / 80 / 60 / 80 / 65 on resists (I've since decided that I like 80 / 80 / 55 / 80 / 70...but you live and learn)
Regens is where I sacrificed points, because I wanted lots of Power Scrolls) 10 HP Regen / 20 Mana Regen
This IS a dread warhorse...so I wanted it to still be a worthy pet...so I added 115 PSs on everything : Wrestling, Tactic, Anatomy, Resists, Parry, Magery, Eval Int, Meditation and Focus
The only special move I added was Armor Ignore.
Now...I think I do prefer my lesser hiryu with bushido and armor ignore to the dread...but the dread is still strong, and probably my next preferred pet. I have not tried training a reptalon yet...so I don't know where that will fall in....but I think that a strong dread is far from an inferior pet that is not really worth training.