Lung Dragons (Oriental Adventures) underpowered

[Sword of Spirit]

Has anyone else noticed that the lung dragons in Oriental Adventures seem underpowered compared to their metallic and chromatic equivalents?

From looking them over, here's what I see:

1. If you take away their detect thoughts, invisibility, alternate form, and plane shift abilities, they are roughly equivalent to the standard dragons without spellcasting. Unless you count the ability to make wing attacks as fairly powerful, in which case they would be weaker.
2. Their CRs indicate they are intended to be as powerful as their HD equivalents in the standard dragons (they should be compared to the 3.0 MM).
3. Therefore, it seems that the designers are counting those 4 special abilities indicated above as roughly equivalent to a standard dragon's spellcasting ability.

This seems wrong to me. For young dragons, sure. Those special abilities are pretty neat. But they do not scale. They are nowhere near as powerful as 19th level sorcerer spellcasting. Advance your dragons beyond entry level great wyrm (following the SRD rules for advanced dragons) and their increase in spellcasting leaves the lung dragons flailing in the dust.

I'm trying to think of a house rule to bump lung dragons to equal footing with standard dragons, but I'd love to hear any suggestions before I finalize anything.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

If you're going to improve lung dragons, might as well go all the way and make them "solo-style". Perhaps giving them the tools to actually deal with multiple PCs would more than make up for the spellcasting.

I don't know if WotC thought the spellcasting was worth that much. The caster levels are a lot less than the CR. Buffs are easily dispelled, attack spells have relatively low DCs despite the dragons' high Charisma scores, etc.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

True, spellcasting loses power quickly when it drops behind CR. However, advanced dragons are epic spellcasters. That is always a force worth considering.

I'm not just looking at what is actually a challenge to PCs, I'm also looking at creature capability overall. Standard high-level and epic dragons have a lot of options. The metallic dragons even add the cleric spell-list to their option for spells. But high-level lung dragons have nothing but the same 4 powers they've had since they were juveniles, plus a few spell-like abilities.

I'm trying to imagine a T'ien Lung great wyrm. He's a high official in the Celestial Bureaucracy. He probably appears as a dignified, aristocratically dressed old man most of the time. He comes and goes unseen and as he wishes. But when it comes to what he can actually do...well, he's a combat machine, and that's it. I'd expect he'd have a bit more mystical power at his beck and call. (Especially since I'm considering playing exactly that character in an epic campaign my friend is going to be running soon--which got me thinking about the issue in the first place.)