I am kind of new to taming myself...But, I do believe in most cases you are going to go with a dragon. In some eras of UO, Wyrms were better for certain spawns...I do not know if that is the case here...
As I understand it, fresh WWs are tougher than fresh Dragons and once trained, the opposite is true. I don't know how well that actually pans out as I've never tested. What I can say though, is that WWs have a faster movement speed (Silver Serpent Speed) and a faster melee, if they have good Dexterity. Their max Dex is 25 points higher (130) than a dragon or nightmare (105). Versus mobs with higher resistance to magic, I think this can play a big role in effectiveness but can't say for certain without testing. Former staff here claimed that WWs were best versus PKs because of their speed.
I prefer Dragons all around. They listen better, you can train them up, etc. I haven't noticed a movement speed difference, but for chasing PKs, that's rather irrelevant I think. I prefer firebreathers for this purpose, since it's un-resistable and can be up to around 105 damage with a full health pair of dragons and nightmare (not to mention potential spells and melee they might happen to hit with.
I did a lot of testing in the early days of UOR when I was playing my tamer a lot more regarding WW vs. Dragons, assuming no major changes have occurred either pet I would say that dragons are much more powerful. However the WW does have benefits, I've put a little list of pros/cons to WW's/Dragons below: White Wyrms Pros - Can eat gold to boost pet happiness - Higher base skills (Magery/Eval) - Higher Dexterity (Faster hits) - Useful when fresh tamed Cons - Lower HP than dragons - Frequently ignore commands at GM taming/lore - No firebreath - Harder to tame, only one spawn Dragons Pros - Can be trained to be much more powerful than WW's - Higher mana pool when trained - Firebreath (Very important as FB is divine damage and will go through any mitigation) - Command success rate close to 100% - Higher strength (More hp/dmg) - Easier to tame/more commonly found Cons - Start with 40~ magery (Almost no offensive spells) - Takes close to a day to train a dragon - Require meat
Ty for the replies. What do you mean by fresh tamed? as opposed to what? Im guessing that im missing something, excuse my noobness.
When you tame a dragon or WW they come with skills such as magery, evaluating intelligence, wrestling, anatomy, tactics and so on. Well on a dragon these skills, in particular magery, start very low. Magery on a freshly tamed dragon is in the 40's. Once magery is trained to the 90's your dragon is flamestriking for example. So, once trained the dragon is better then a WW but a fresh tame dragon (not trained) will get eaten by a WW.
Dragons hands-down, especially after the pet-bonding expansion. Now that you can have an army bonded, you should always have trained dragons available. You don't even have to train them - just use them a couple of times and they'll quickly outperform WWs. You may want to read up on pet loyalty too. The short version is that pets slowly lose loyalty over time. If you feed them, they will gain loyalty. In practice, the main cause of losing loyalty is when you issue a command and they refuse it. This causes their loyalty to drastically drop. On the flip side, issuing a command that they obey will cause their loyalty to go up. Since dragons have a lower taming difficulty, they accept commands easier. So spamming 'All Guard Me' a bunch of times will likely return dragons to their max loyalty level. You never have to feed them! Also, enough cannot be said about how important firebreath is, especially against other players and bosses. Most bosses on UOR have high resistance to pets. Firebreath is the only thing that gets around this restriction. 40+ damage firebreaths have a huge impact when your dragons are punching for 3 damage. Not having firebreath is a massive strike against WWs. That said, I still rock Wyrms from time to time just because they look cool.
I always thought dragons were better than white wyrms when they was trained. This is not the case. So Mandevu who has a 7x wyrm and my dragon who is 6x with 80 resist tried this out because I needed to know. 1st duel ended both near 10% hp. 2nd duel however he bested my dragon with 15% more health. The dragon I used was 825 str/105dex 821hp and his wyrm was 730str and 130 dex. 130 **Dex is key for a wyrm All in all I will still seek out my beloved perfect dragons but alas wyrms are awesome too!
My dragon is close to those same stats except my dragon is 6xgm with 99 anatomy and my 130dex wrym beats him every single time. Some times its really close and others the wyrm slaughters the dragon. I have been trying to tell people this for a long time, and i used to think a fully trained dragon was better, but it is not. Wyrms dex is the ultimate key factor every time. When hunting, and after your pets have exhausted their mana, a wyrm is by far more lethal. Two dragons with zero mana do not even compare to two wyrms at 130 dex. People have argued against this time and time again, but i showed musician and timbo today that a 130 dex wyrm will beat a fully trained dragon. I do agree with dalavar about wanting the firebreath for PK's. I've seen on more than one occasion a pk have a pair of trained dragons sick after him and engulf his corpse with spells and firebreath instantly. But when it comes to farming, or killing high HP bosses, wyrms are the way to go.
If you're farming a non-boss-spawning monster, then wyrms are fine and probably better than dragons for any session lasting longer than 15 minutes (i.e. when the initial mana pool advantage of the dragons becomes less and less important). If you're spawning a boss-producing monster (i.e. elder gazers and the beholders they spawn), I much prefer dragons. They're just so much better against bosses since their firebreath doesn't have the tamer nerf applied, while melee does. Fighting a dragon against a wyrm isn't a particularly useful test of farming ability for a few reasons. One being it's probably not long enough for the mana pool advantage of the dragons to come into play. Two because your dragons have greatly reduced firebreath as they take damage, which is completely unrelated to how they behave at full health when you're farming.
Right, but farming for longer periods than a dragons mana pool is going to significantly tip the scale in favor of wyrms. Idk what nerf you're talking about, but I find wyrms melee dmg to be slightly higher than dragons, combined with much quicker speed I don't think dragons are better against bosses. Oh well I don't really care anyway lol.
If you do use white wyrms, just spam commands more, since they don't always listen. Also I think both are good.
Wyrms hit for like 7, dragons for 6, and dragon firebreath hits for 40. So yes, their melee is higher, but firebreath makes up the bulk of the damage done to bosses.
Sorry I'm newer to server, but I remember specifically not using WWs b/c of mass curse. Do they mass curse here? (Curse aoe and cause aggro on you/pets)
