Personally, I've only run across one unbalanced dragon item. The wizard power Grasp of the Grave is clearly one of the best powers at that level, and then it got errated to be even more powerful. Other than that, I've found dragon material to be about as good as anything else.
Having used
Grasp of the Grave extensively, I can say it is stone cold nuts. It is one of the few powers for Wizard that only targets enemies. Plus the zone it creates stays without a minor action to sustain it. It can be effected by Enlarge Spell with little penalty and Daze is a very good condition.
Personally, I disagree with the original point of the post. Dragon stuff isn't designed to reward a player with better crunch (for a small monthly fee
). What you are seeing is a side effect of producing a lot of core-crunch (since everything in Dragon is officially core). With the amount of new core feats, powers, paragon paths, and epic destinies, you are bound to have power creep.
Of course, to counter my own point, I'll point out the recent Bahamut article with two absurdly good paladin feats;
Forceful Challenge at paragon (which is obviously broken and needs a fix) and
Weakening Challenge at epic. Both of these feats are absurdly good. In it's current state,
Forceful Challenge is the best paragon feat for Paladins and probably better then anything at epic.
