At what level does a typical D&D class can outsell a dragons of other fiction

[duburu]

Typical generic dragon of most western fantasy, not the magic wielding one. Just winged lizard with firebreath and steel scale

[LibraryOgre]

Pretty unanswerable, given the wide disparity between the various classes, editions, and legendary dragons.

[Knaight]

Putting aside how it's not even clear exactly what is being asked here - "outsell" doesn't make a whole lot of sense in this context - there's a lot of variation. There is no singular typical fire breathing dragon, and there's a titanic distance between what is basically a small alligator which happens to fly and breathe fire intermittently and a city sized behemoth that wouldn't be out of place in a Godzilla movie.

[Morcleon]

Level 1. Most fire-breathing monstrosities aren't allowed into marketplaces.

More seriously, probably around level 10 or so for most classes, and level 5 or 6 for full casters.

[LudicSavant]

It's a bit unclear what the OP is asking, but...

The point where you start being expected to kill monsters large enough to ride that fly around and throw mean projectiles at you from the sky, one on one, is about level 5.

The prime example? Manticores (CR5). They are big enough for dragonriders, they fly, they throw spikes that are about as deadly as dragonbreath in some fantasy, and have natural armor that's as tough as steel armor.

Things can of course get more challenging by making the dragon bigger, breath fire better (longer, hotter, better arc, etc), or just how thick those steel scales are.

[awa]

it also depends on how you build the creature I have seen Conan depicted as level 6 and I have seen him at level 30 there both supposed to be depicting the same character with the same abilities but the various designers depicted him at vastly different levels. So one person might say well the dragon breathes fire, fire deals d6 dam therefore he has a breath weapon that deals d6 dam. Another person might say well the hero would have been instantly killed if the dragon breathed on him in the story so therefore the dragon should deal 100d10 fire dam.

Its the same dragon with the same capabilities in theory but one is much easier to kill then the other.