Quote Originally Posted by Morphic tide View Post
The dragon can wear armor too! This is a recurring issue in these threads, people seem to constantly look at the monster statblock and assume that's the PC you're playing, but it's not. You get the full suite of chargen resources, you can select feats as desired, you can buy anything anyone else can even if quite a bit has markups, and there's the frequent ignoring of how much of quite a few perfectly playable builds are dedicated to aping monster math rather poorly.

One to three levels (mainly Martial Adepts), basic WBL uses, and a Sovereign Archetype gets the damage output to "Actionable Threat", basic WBL brings to "Basically Immortal Without Specifically Countering Them" disturbingly easily (you can even get a good Touch AC!), and a large Fly speed plus Astral travel give many, many options in actual gameplay where being able to get places you aren't supposed to be while having good combat numbers is plenty enough to start derailments. "Surprise Not-Quite-Clericzilla Dragon In Medium Mithral" can mess up all sorts of things.

Put me down for Wyrmling +1, Very Young and Young +0, rest -0. Not enough room to be flashy for the latter two, but it takes very few levels of Martial Adept classes to get damage on track, and LA +1 doesn't mess that up. Which is there because Plane Shift takes a 9th level Cleric (or, more relevantly, Favored Soul, as "small selection of campaign-warping powers and still fine otherwise" like I'm worried of this is the very definition of t2), so the 8th level Wyrmling is early in provoking that specific change and its rather lengthy downstream side-effects.

For reference, here's a thread of a guy vigorously crowbarring the giant official LAs into passable build stubs with varying levels of cheese, which usually results in worse "dead" ECL than people are complaining about here. Dragons have quite a bit of stuff available to push past their base statblock, Wyrm of War in particular clears a lot of ground in Martial terms, giving Simple and Martial weapon proficiencies and Armor proficiencies, no mention of lacking shields. So yeah, even without getting to the class level you can have a basic beatstick with the Astral shenanigans still online.
I agree with all of this except the definition of T2. +1, +0, -0 respectively.