Board Thread:Dragon Story Breeding/@comment-25277073-20140807162543/@comment-27957947-20170206082951

The Goodwitch X Metal thing is a common misconception. The idea behind it is if a breeding pair has only a few possible outcomes, getting a Diamond Dragon is more likely. That is not true. All it does is make it so you'll keep seeing the same small group of dragons as fails, over and over (as you are seeing with all those Winter Dragons). With every breeding pair, there is only about a 1% chance of breeding an ultra rare (maybe less). There is always a much, much, much greater chance of breeding a common or a rare, or even a super rare- no matter how many unique dragons the pair can potentially produce.

Look at breeding like two wheels you have to spin. The first wheel is always the same for every breeding pair. It determines the rarity of your egg. The first wheel has 100 slots: 60 slots are labeled common, 30 are labeled rare, 9 are super rare and only 1 is ultra rare. You spin that wheel to land the rarity of your egg. The only way you can possibly breed a Diamond Dragon is if you were lucky enough to land on that one little ultra rare slot. Sadly, the odds are definitely not in your favor.

The make-up of the second wheel changes with every breeding- it depends on the results from your first spin and your chosen breeding pair. If you landed on common and your chosen breeding pair has 4 common outcomes, the second wheel will have 4 slots. Spin the wheel to find out which of those common dragons you are getting. Whichever of the 4 you land on is the dragon you have just bred.

If you landed on common in the first spin and your chosen breeding pair has 80 common dragon outcomes, the second wheel would have 80 slots, one for each unique dragon. If you got rare on your first spin, the second wheel would be comprised of only the rare dragons that can come from your breeding pair.

The possibility of breeding Diamond Dragon was ruled out as soon as that first wheel landed in something other than ultra rare. Whether a breeding pair has 150 potential outcomes or only a handful- like Metal X Goodwitch- makes no difference.

This is also why using someone else's successful breeding pair won't increase your odds, either. Specific pairs don't matter. The only thing that does matter is having the correct colors present in the parents (any 4 colors for a Diamond). Everything else is up the the algorithm S8 uses and the rules of odds and probablity (which the person who started this rumor does not understand, unfortunately).

For my first Diamond Dragon (level 117, I think it was), I made a list of 20 dragons I really wanted. Then, I figured out which 2 dragons I had that could produce as many of those dragons as possible, as well as a Diamond Dragon. That way many of the 'fails' were anything but. By the time I got my Diamond, I had also bred a dozen of the dragons on my most wanted list plus several other new-to-me dragons. The pair I picked had about 100 possible outcomes, so it was full of interesting possibilities. That definitely helped keep frustration at not getting a Diamond to a minimum. It took about 2 months (maybe 3 months? no more than that, though) of breeding my chosen pair for a Diamond to pop out.