2-9 April Weekly Dragon Pieces review: Painted Dragon

Hello Dragon Ladies and Lords! As you may have already noticed, this week Painted Dragon's pieces can be found in card packs. This text will provide you with general information about Painted obtaining, potential usages in battles, breeding, temple upgrading and gold generation to finally help you decide whether you should spend your clan coins (or even gems) this week. So, let's start!

Obtaining

Painted Dragon was all chests reward in Easter castle event last year, which means that players who have been playing DML for over a year most likely have either Painted Dragon, or some amount of Painted's pieces. Players who started their adventure in Dragonlandia after last year's Easter have had no chance of obtaining any single piece of Painted until this week. This means that the difficulty of obtaining Painted will vary very much between players. 

Painted's egg

Now, Painted pieces can be found in any card packs, including a card you get for completing daily quest, free card for watching a video ad, card packs bought for clan coins and dragon piece tickets/gems. They also have increased chances of appearing. Gameloft has never revealed any information on how big is the chance to get a Painted piece, but I estimate this chance as about 15% (treat this number carefully, as it's calculated from small statistic sample that may not be representative). With maximum of three free cards per day (one from daily quests and two for ads), this would mean average of about three Painted pieces per player this week. So, if you miss just one or two pieces from last year, better wait till Sunday with buying card packs for clan coins or gems, as it's likely that you will not need to buy any card packs. And if you don't have any Painted pieces, this would mean that you need to open about 130 extra cards this weeks to get the dragon. Counting 750 clan coins per card and assuming you earn full 1000 clan coins per day, you would need about 30 000 clan coins saved, or be willing to spend equivalent of about 2 400 gems in dragon piece tickets. This is quite a lot! Is Painted worth it?

Note: all above calculations are based on data that may not be representative as too small sample, so treat the results carefully. It may happen that you will get Painted much easier, or that after opening 130 cards you will not get Painted!

Painted usages

With wind as base element, Painted would be vulnerable to fire and light attacks, which is quite bad. Only three different element strengths isn't what we want from epic card either. Painted could actually be any good battle dragon only for beginner player, who doesn't even have many tri-elementals yet, but is it even possible that beginner player would be able to get this dragon without spending huge amounts of real money? I don't think so.

Also as a gold generator, Painted isn't awesome as well. Plant habitat is the best option for him, which unfortunately isn't any close to being optimal. 410 base gold per hour is quite an average for a dragon that we would put in plant habitat.

On the other hand, there are only three dragons that shares element set with Painted and all of them are limited-time. Those are: Academic, Scribble and Palm. If you aren't lucky to have any of them, Painted is a dragon that would be really nice to have. In certain cases, having him may save you some food while upgrading temples. And, what's more important, if there is ever gonna be a Dragon of the Month requiring combination of fire, wind, plant and earth elements, Fire+Painted will be a highly recommended combination. 

Conclusion

Painted baby

If you missed Painted Dragon last year by just a few pieces, you have a nice occasion to complete the dragon rather easily. On the other hand, if you don't have any pieces from the last year, obtaining Painted will be very hard for you. Although this dragon may provide you with some usefulness that no normally-breedable dragon can provide, the estimated cost of obtaining it without pieces from last year seems disproportionately large. So, unless you have many, many spare clan coins, or really love this dragon for the design, if you don't have any pieces from last year, don't try obtaining it now. Especially that it's Easter-themed, so unlike "normal" weekly dragon pieces, it will most likely not return till next Easter season, and if you get, for example, 10 pieces now, it will be no different than having 0 pieces for next year. But if you need just a few pieces to complete it - definitely try it! Just wait with buying card packs a few more days, as you may get some pieces from the daily quests.

Please tell me in comments what do you think about this dragon! Have a wonderful day in your Dragonlandia :)