@Paracelsus: I first met you when I bought a +30 ASH from you like 2 weeks ago, and we talked about some stuff besides BODs, including whether there was any trick to fix my dragon without resetting its stats. I pretty much asked everybody I talked to about it
By the way, if you get any more +30 ASH, I'll probably need another one in a few weeks; I've burned through like 150 charges already.
About that dragon: I am going to probably just keep hunting with him as-is: My tamer is GM cartography, lockpicking, fishing, the 3 taming skills, and 70 magery 30 item ID; he's mostly a treasure hunter. The usual spawn from a t map is like 2x lich lords, a blood ele and a poison ele; not exactly overwhelming but they do cast a lot of high-end spells. I like to use him at the balron and ancient lich spawns on occasion, too. The dragon can survive in PvM with low resist, and he's not likely to survive a PvP encounter no matter how well-trained he is; my character has exactly zero PvP skills, and once my character dies, he's a sitting duck.
I did luck up on a 825/824 red dragon fresh tame that I'm going to train to 7x. Why hybrid's great: While I was taming it, a PK killed me; I thought "Oh, crap, that dragon's toast"; I had been keeping it at 4% health to make it easier to tame, one e-bolt and it would have died, but he saw what I was doing and helped me tame it.
I might try using a swampy or something like a drake as a target sometime, but I've never had any luck with using them; when the mare gets pretty high magery, they die really easy unless they're well-trained, and taking the time to train one would sorta defeat the purpose; I would have to get up and rez my dexxer's swampy every few minutes. Not exactly set-it-and-forget it. Plus, that 7k gp worth of armor that pops when the swampy dies isn't much, but it's probably more than I would spend on bandages for my dexxer to get the mare all the way to GM, if I don't use a second dexxer as a backup healer. The dexxer used less than 2k bandages last night; that's about 2k gold to get a mare from 65/65.1 to 79.3/91.4 mage/eval.
I use my dexxer because he doesn't die when the nightmare does a huge mana dump. I'm currently training a mare I bought a couple days ago. It was a fresh tame, and I GM'ed magic resist the night I bought it. I left them sparring all night last night, without even using my other dexxer as a backup healer, and they were still going at it this morning. The mare gained from 65/65.1 mage/eval to 79.3/91.4 in about 8 hours. I did change the times a little: My doorman kept the door open 12 seconds then left it closed for 33 seconds; that way, the mare could do his mana dump and recharge some of his mana, and the dexxer had enough time to heal poison and apply a 2nd bandage to get him back to 100% health, then he could just sit around waiting the last 11 seconds for the next mana dump. Not having 60 seconds for the mare to recharge its mana means sometimes it will run out of mana, but the spells are so random that most of the time he'll have some left after the mana dump, and will be able to at least cast one or two high-end spells when the door opens. I tried cutting the time that the door was closed to 22 seconds for an hour this morning, but the mare only gained .3 eval and no magery, and it was constantly out of mana. Epic fail. It's looking like somewhere in the 30 seconds to 1 minute range is going to be optimum.
Another advantage to using a dexxer:. If I wasn't too lazy to make the macro a little more complicated, I could use the dexxer as the doorman and make him totally death-proof by just adding a conditional to the razor macro: If health > 99 open door, if health < 50 close door. A simple double click item type would work. However, unless he's poisoned, the dexxer generally gets back to 100 health in 11 seconds after the mare's mana dump, so the mare wouldn't have enough time to regenerate mana, so it couldn't cast many high-end spells, and would seldom, if ever, get a gain once it hits like 85 magery.
Which brings up the really big problem, no matter what you're using as a target: Getting the timing just right so the door stays closed long enough that the mare regenerates enough mana so it can cast enough high-end spells that it maximizes gains, but doesn't have any extra time to stand around with 125 mana. And the amount of time it needs to recharge changes some as the mare gets better magery skill. I'm still playing with the timing; it's tricky trying to get it just right.