Definitely replace the default armor. I wore a chest that gave me an extra 40% health, because for some reason dragon health doesn't regenerate, but mana does. I wore legs that gave me 40% to offense because I wanted to destroy things as quickly as possible. I'm not sure the rest mattered because the game seemed to preset my skills.
Use your wyvern friend, which doesn't seem to last very long so repeated summons are necessary. Use your dragon spirit to keep health topped up.
Other than that, keep trying. It is frustrating and I couldn't do it without several tries on casual difficulty. It doesn't help that the nuke skill is poorly described so that I wasn't sure what it was for; I wasn't even using it on my first try as I'd associated it with Bellegar's device and thought I should save it for the end of the mission.
For the most part, ignore the zeppelin and focus on your own health and welfare, and just keep destroying as much as you can, as quickly as you can.
Hopefully Larian will avoid escort missions in future endeavors.
Oh and the argument that we had lots of practice with fortresses isn't entirely valid for the escort mission: yes I destroyed ballistae, nests, and so on, but I did it at my own pace with only my own welfare to worry about. My pace is much slower than that of the escort mission.
I think those of us having the most trouble are finding dragon form to be weaker than human form. As a human I can one-shot most enemies with powerful magic, but my dragon has to work at it. As a human I survive better against groups of enemies, but my dragon has to hope his cooldowns are reset, or fly away and heal up. ED's Well Cave battle and FoV's escort mission highlight these differences.
Overall I give patched DKS a 9/10 rating because I thoroughly enjoy the rest of the game. (I played from beginning to end last week while I had some time off from work.)
